1 · OPENING
Nick Jones did not begin with hotel rooms.
He began with regulars.
People already came to Cafe Boheme. They knew one another. They worked in film, fashion, media and the creative industries.
Then Jones was offered the floors above the restaurant.
The first Soho House was almost accidental.
The important decision was what not to put upstairs.
Not another restaurant.
Not a conventional hotel.
A club.
The hospitality product began with the people already in the room.
2 · WHY HE MATTERS
Hotels normally organise themselves around transient guests.
Members' clubs organise themselves around recurring relationships.
Jones brought those two logics together.
A Soho House member can eat, drink, work, exercise, watch films, attend events, meet friends and, in many Houses, sleep.
The bedroom is only one component of a larger membership relationship.
The guest asks: Where should I stay?
The member asks: Where is my House?
3 · BEFORE SOHO HOUSE
Jones began in catering and hospitality, including Trusthouse Forte and Grosvenor House Hotel, before moving through restaurant management.
He opened his first restaurant, Over the Top, in 1988 and Cafe Boheme in Soho in 1992.
Soho House did not begin with luxury-hotel theory.
It began with restaurants.
Jones learned the rhythm of a room before he built bedrooms around it.
4 · 1995 — THE ACCIDENTAL HOUSE
Soho House dates the first House to 1995 at 40 Greek Street, above Cafe Boheme.
Jones later described the origin as accidental: landlord Paul Raymond offered him the floors above the restaurant.
Cafe Boheme regulars helped form the first committee. A hard-hat preview was held in 1994.
When the House opened in January 1995, Jones later recalled around 500 members.
The community existed before the global brand.
5 · MEMBERSHIP CHANGES THE CUSTOMER
A hotel customer can be anonymous.
A member cannot be entirely anonymous.
Membership creates a continuing identity. The House knows who belongs. The member knows that other people in the room have also passed through a selection process.
This creates a social product that ordinary hotel distribution cannot reproduce simply by selling a room.
The inventory is not only space.
It is access.
6 · THE COMMITTEE
From the beginning, committees helped shape membership.
The desired community was creative rather than purely financial.
Selection therefore became part of atmosphere.
A club can design interiors.
It can also, controversially, design the room by deciding who enters it.
7 · BELONGING AS HOSPITALITY
Soho House describes itself as a club for creatives and says it exists to provide a home for members to come together and belong.
The word belonging is more important than luxury.
Traditional luxury emphasises service delivered to the individual.
Membership hospitality also depends on relationships between individuals.
Members create value for other members.
8 · 1998 — BABINGTON HOUSE
Babington House opened in Somerset in 1998 as the first House with bedrooms.
Jones had noticed that the London House became quieter at weekends because members left the city.
So Soho House followed them.
The insight is simple:
watch where the community goes next.
Then build there.
9 · NOT LIKE A HOTEL
The design brief for Babington House was explicitly to make it feel less like a hotel and more like a home.
Designer Susie Atkinson later described the result as understated but glamorous, informal yet sophisticated.
Roll-top baths entered bedrooms. Cowshed began in an actual former cowshed on the estate.
Domesticity became a luxury code.
10 · FOLLOW THE MEMBER
The logic repeated.
Members went to New York. Soho House opened there in 2003.
Members worked and socialised in Shoreditch. Shoreditch House opened in 2007.
Members wanted places to work. Soho Works arrived.
Expansion is strongest when it looks less like a real-estate map and more like following an existing community.
11 · NEW YORK — THE IDEA TRAVELS
Soho House New York opened in Manhattan's Meatpacking District in 2003, the first House outside the UK.
Jones later recalled the risk: the brand was little known in America.
The move demonstrated that the creative-community idea could travel beyond London.
The House did not need Soho the neighbourhood.
It needed a local creative ecosystem capable of becoming its own Soho.
12 · THE HOUSE AS SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
A successful House contains overlapping reasons to remain.
Breakfast. Meetings. Lunch. Pool. Gym. Film. Dinner. Party. Bedroom. Work.
The longer the member stays inside the ecosystem, the more useful membership becomes.
The House is designed to absorb different parts of the day.
13 · CULTURE AS PROGRAMMING
Film was embedded in Soho House from the beginning. The first Greek Street space already contained a cinema, and film programming became part of the club's relationship with the entertainment industry.
Screenings, talks, performances, art and events became recurring membership content.
The building is not enough.
The calendar has to be designed too.
14 · SHOREditch — CATCH THE NEIGHBOURHOOD EARLY
Jones has described opening Shoreditch House in 2007 when east London had not yet become the polished high-end district it later became.
The creative community was already there.
Do not wait for the district to become obvious.
Find the people first.
The real-estate value may follow the culture.
15 · THE ROOFTOP POOL
Shoreditch House's rooftop pool illustrates the method.
A pool is an amenity.
A rooftop pool surrounded by the right people becomes social theatre.
The physical object matters, but the member mix, music, weather, view and possibility of encounter complete the product.
Soho House repeatedly turns amenities into scenes.
16 · SOHO FARMHOUSE AND SOHO WORKS
Soho Farmhouse opened in Oxfordshire in 2015 and extended the rural model beyond Babington.
That same year Soho Works launched.
The company could now follow members into countryside leisure and the working day.
The boundary between hotel, club, restaurant, office and lifestyle platform became increasingly porous.
17 · THE HOUSE LEAVES THE HOUSE
Soho Home launched in 2016 after members repeatedly asked how to buy furniture, lighting and objects associated with the Houses.
Usually a consumer brand enters hotels.
Here a hospitality environment created enough design desire to become a consumer-products brand.
The House could now follow the member home.
18 · COWSHED — AN AMENITY BECOMES A BRAND
Cowshed began in 1998 in a former cowshed at Babington House.
What started as an amenity developed into a wider wellness and product identity.
Again the platform creates brands from behaviours already occurring inside the House.
19 · MEMBERSHIP AS RECURRING REVENUE
A hotel room must be sold again every night.
Membership creates another revenue relationship.
The member pays for access over time, then may also spend on food, drink, bedrooms, wellness and other services.
This does not eliminate hotel economics.
It overlays them with subscription logic.
20 · SCARCITY AND THE WAITLIST
Membership gains value partly because access is not automatic.
Committees, applications and waitlists create scarcity.
But this creates a permanent tension.
The business benefits from more members.
The club atmosphere may benefit from fewer.
Growth can damage the exclusivity that drives demand.
21 · 2022 — FOUNDER, NOT CEO
In November 2022 Jones stepped down as CEO of Membership Collective Group and moved into a founder role.
The company said he would focus on designing Houses, improving membership experience and motivating teams.
The operating corporation can be professionalised.
The founder's taste remains harder to replace.
22 · WHAT HE CHANGED
He transformed a local creative members' club into a global hospitality platform.
He made membership and belonging central to a hotel-adjacent luxury model.
He demonstrated that bedrooms could be secondary to community rather than the starting point of the business.
He turned restaurants, clubs, hotels, workspaces, wellness, film, art and retail into one recurring member ecosystem.
He made informal domestic design a recognisable hospitality language.
He showed that expansion could follow the movements of an existing community rather than only conventional market analysis.
He made the people in the room part of the product.
He made belonging bookable.
23 · WHAT THIS MODEL DOES NOT SOLVE
Selection creates exclusion. A membership club deliberately decides who belongs and who does not, raising questions about fairness, opacity and social homogeneity.
Growth threatens intimacy. The more Houses and members the network adds, the harder it becomes to preserve a private-community feeling.
Creative identity can become a status code. A club founded for working creatives can evolve into a symbol consumed for social signalling.
Membership does not remove hotel economics. Bedrooms, restaurants and Houses still require disciplined operations.
Community cannot be manufactured entirely by design. Beautiful rooms and events do not guarantee meaningful relationships.
Founder taste is difficult to institutionalise. Professional management can scale systems more easily than intuition about what makes a House feel right.
Local creative ecosystems can be altered by the club's arrival. A House may recognise an emerging neighbourhood while also participating in commercial forces that change it.
Subscription logic can prioritise member growth over member experience.
Jones did not solve the contradiction between community and scale.
He built a business whose success depends on managing it continuously.
24 · JONES AND CLAUS SENDLINGER
Claus Sendlinger curates independent hotels for travellers who want difference.
Nick Jones curates people for spaces designed to produce belonging.
Design Hotels selects properties.
Soho House selects members.
Sendlinger makes the hotel network the filter.
Jones makes the room itself the filter.
Both turned curation into hospitality infrastructure.
25 · JONES AND IAN SCHRAGER
Ian Schrager understood that the people in a hotel lobby could become as important as the rooms upstairs.
Nick Jones pushed the idea into membership.
Schrager's lobby is public theatre.
Jones's House is semi-private social infrastructure.
Schrager creates a scene people want to enter.
Jones asks them to apply first.
26 · JONES AND RICHARD BRANSON
Richard Branson makes the owner's personality part of hospitality.
Nick Jones makes the member community part of hospitality.
Virgin says the extraordinary host matters.
Soho House says the other guests matter.
Branson supplies personality from the top.
Jones tries to produce it horizontally across the room.
27 · LHL CONNECTIONS
LHL-203 · Soho House — principal anchor assigned to Nick Jones in the current People Register.
40 Greek Street — original House, opened 1995.
Babington House — first House with bedrooms, opened 1998; birthplace of Cowshed.
Soho House New York — first international House, opened 2003.
Soho Works — workspace extension launched 2015.
Soho Home — interiors extension launched 2016.
LHL-P-036 Claus Sendlinger · Claus Sendlinger, LHL-P-098 · Ian Schrager and LHL-P-032 Richard Branson · Richard Branson — key comparisons.
28 · TIMELINE
29 · LHL STORY — THE HOTEL THAT BEGAN WITH NO BEDROOMS
London, 1995.
Nick Jones had a restaurant.
Then his landlord offered him the floors above.
A hotelier would have counted how many bedrooms could fit.
Jones did something stranger.
He opened a club.
The first Soho House did not need bedrooms to become hospitality.
It needed a room people wanted to return to.
Three years later, at Babington House, bedrooms arrived.
By then the hierarchy had already been established.
First, create belonging.
Then give belonging somewhere to sleep.
LHL-P-037 · LHL-203 · Soho House · Long Essay / Video
30 · A SECOND STORY — FOLLOW THEM OUT OF TOWN
The first Soho House worked in London.
Then weekends became quiet.
Nick Jones noticed why.
The members had left.
A conventional operator might have launched a weekend promotion.
Jones followed them.
Babington House opened in the Somerset countryside in 1998.
Later, members went to New York. Soho House went to New York.
They worked in Shoreditch. Soho House went east.
They wanted workspace. Soho Works appeared.
Watch where the community is going.
Then get there before the relationship breaks.
LHL-P-037 · Soho House
31 · LEGACY
Nick Jones changed what the core inventory of a hospitality company could be.
Not rooms.
Not tables.
Not square metres.
Relationships.
The original House was valuable because of who returned.
Babington added bedrooms to the relationship.
New York proved the community model could travel.
Soho Works extended it into the working day.
Soho Home extended it into the member's private home.
The model can be criticised for exclusivity, status signalling and the permanent tension between intimacy and corporate growth.
Those criticisms arise from the same mechanism that makes it powerful.
Membership creates belonging by drawing a boundary.
Jones turned that boundary into a global hospitality business.
Nick Jones made belonging bookable.