Since 2022, Wow!house has become London’s most celebrated designer event, dubbed “The Oscars of the design world.” This year, 22 world-class designers participated in creating Wow!house from the ground up inside the Design Avenue at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour. Several themes were noted throughout this year’s showhouse including a shared reverence for craft, passion for collecting, cinematic sense of narrative, an eye toward cocooning, and sophisticated levels of expertise.
Sponsors included Benjamin Moore and Jo Malone London, with a masterclass on lighting from Kelly Hoppen CBE. A percentage of ticket sales supports WOW!house 2025’s charity partner, United in Design. WOW!house promotes the important cultural heritage of craft via the relationships the Design Centre has built with QEST (the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust), United in Design and more.
The event was open from June through July 3, 2025 and today we are delighted to take a peek inside some of our favorite rooms with photography by James McDonald!
Artorius Faber Entrance Garden by Alexander Hoyle
English gardens touch all our senses, evoking memories and creating new ones as fleeting as peak bloom. In a new space for this year’s WOW!house, Hoyle encapsulates how the natural world, shaped by human hands, delivers wonder and delight, pairing inventive planting with the finest British stone and garden antiques. It’s a little slice of heaven that paves the way for our journey.
Adam Architecture Façade by Darren Price
We open with a bang. This commanding multi-dimensional façade gives WOW!house a whole new sense of arrival, cleverly eliciting the initial ‘WOW!’ that heralds what’s to come. A progressive experience, each step forward reveals new layers of design, creativity, and craftsmanship. This contemporary interpretation of Georgian architecture demonstrates that the enduring principles of Classicism remain as relevant, inspiring, and enjoyable today as they were 250 years ago – and serves as a prelude to the world beyond, a threshold between past and present. Welcome in!
Cox London Entrance Hall by Victoria Davar of Maison Artefact
Step inside and feel your spirits soar. A massive oak leaf chandelier spirals upward and signifies the optimism and creativity fueling this collaboration. “The English oak is such a classic symbol,” Davar says. “The idea that great things come from small beginnings, that ‘mighty oaks from little acorns grow’, is very much at the heart of this project.” Inspiration from iconic artists – Cy Twombly at the Villa di Monserrato, Jean Cocteau in Villa Santo Sospir, Picasso at Château Grimaldi in Antibes – and pioneering patron Peggy Guggenheim sets the stage for a flourishing of contemporary work by makers and creators from our United in Design directory alongside Cox London’s refined creations.
Sims Hilditch Courtyard Room by Emma Sims-Hilditch
Think muddy boots and dogs, sports gear, cutting flowers and rinsing garden vegetables. The back of house gets its moment in the spotlight, thanks to Emma Sims-Hilditch, a pioneer of the modern British country house. The space will be divided into two parts: a dedicated area for dog and welly washing and a boot room. “Our concept is to create a country house entrance and boot room that oozes fun and warmth and that is filled with character and charm,” Sims-Hilditch explains. It will incorporate antiques, fine art, bespoke Delft tiles, beautiful wall finishes and architectural detailing, showcasing how clever design can make a newly built place feel like it has always been there. This delightful space promises to be a real bow-wow-house that will offer inspiration to all who see it and be the talk of the town.
Casa Branca Bedroom by Alessandra Branca
Living La Dolce Vita. With offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and Palm Beach, this Roman-born designer delivers a range of work from private residences to hotels, offices, and yachts across the globe, spanning California and Colorado, New York, London, Rome and the Bahamas. For the ultimate guest bedroom, she dreams up a respite – inviting and indulgent, an elevation of everyday life. Expect a heady mix of contemporary art and collectible design, plus an object lesson in the inventive use of fabrics, featuring this globe-trotting star’s namesake collection, Casa Branca. With her signature use of colour and sense of comfortable chic, Branca’s aesthetic blends “then, now and a hint of the future.”
Treasure House Fair Morning Room by Daniel Slowik
A Room for a Collector. The presiding spirit here is someone like Richard Wallace, whose London home Hertford House remains as the Wallace Collection. Here, antique pieces from the trove of dealers in the renowned Treasure House Fair marry with Slowik’s own ‘Nuthall Temple’ collection of fabric and furnishings. Working in the tradition of English Couture, a design thread that runs from William Kent in the 18th century to John Fowler in the 20th century, Slowik’s signature attention to craft and detail, honed during his time at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, finds expression in this space devoted to that great enrichment to life, which is the appreciation of beautiful things.
Fromental Drawing Room by Chad Caleb Dorsey
Relaxed luxury is Dorsey’s touchstone – and that’s the vibe in a space he envisions as a timeless Arts and Crafts Drawing Room turned social club. Abuzz with piano music, conversation, and cocktails, Dorsey’s design builds bridges, connecting people from diverse backgrounds and linking the British and American Arts and Crafts Movements. With offices in Dallas and Los Angeles, Dorsey’s residential clients include celebrities and professional athletes while hospitality projects include the Auberge Resorts Collection. His first book, published by Assouline, launched in February.
Lopen Joinery Kitchen by Ben Pentreath Studio
A boldly coloured Greco-Gothic kitchen in the Yorkshire Dales sounds about right from a studio known for its “reverent architecture and irreverent interior decoration.” Ben Pentreath celebrates the detailing and materials found “behind the green baize door,” once the dividing line between servants and family in an English country house. With an eye toward sustainability, the studio worked with Lopen Joinery to create the least fitted kitchen possible, where each piece connects as though they were collected rather than all being designed by the same hand. That hand, however, has produced extraordinary work, from large-scale urban development to restorations of “an impossibly romantic moated house in Suffolk, two rare and idiosyncratic examples of the English baroque, restrained neoclassical houses in the north of England, as well as castles in Cumbria, Cornwall and the Highlands of Scotland.”
McKinnon and Harris Garden Terrace by Randle Siddeley
Celebrating 50 years of creating beautiful landscapes, Randle Siddeley brings all his tools to imagining a conservatory or orangery, inspired by the exotic luxury of the ‘Palm Court.’ An opulent setting filled with lush planting and surrounded by ornate trelliswork, this is a ‘sensuous haven’ where the formality of traditional interiors gives way to a more relaxed elegance. “The orangery should be a retreat – an immersive escape where one can pause, entertain and reconnect with nature,” Siddeley says. Bespoke McKinnon and Harris furnishings seamlessly complement the landscape design. Rising stars Studio Miaki are collaborating on style, introducing accents of colour and pattern with a sense of playfulness. This is a gathering spot that exudes escapism – perfect for entertaining, indulging in the traditions of high tea, or sipping a signature cocktail—perhaps even two!
To learn more about WOW!house, click HERE and follow @designcentrech on Instagram for updates about next year’s show.
About Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour
Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour in London is the world’s premier destination for design and decoration. Home to 130+ showrooms and more than 600 international brands, it is the largest of its kind in Europe and the first port of call for professional designers and architects sourcing for prestigious residential and commercial projects, as well as design enthusiasts seeking inspiration for their own homes. A thriving events programme, including WOW!house, cements its reputation as an exceptionally dynamic, thriving hub.
The full list of 2025 participating designers is below:
Artorius Faber Entrance Garden by Alexander Hoyle
Adam Architecture Facade by Darren Price
Cox London Entrance Hall by Victoria Davar of Maison Artefact
Fromental Drawing Room by Chad Dorsey
Nucleus Media Room by Alex Dauley
Philip Jeffries Study by Staffan Tollgård
Stark Curator’s Room by Brigitta Spinocchia Freund
Fortuny + Bonacina + Barovier&Toso Primary Bedroom by Tomèf Design
House of Rohl Primary Bathroom by 1508 London
Treasure House Morning Room by Daniel Slowik
Perennials and Sutherland Courtyard by Goddard Littlefair
Sims Hilditch Courtyard Room by Emma Sims-Hilditch
Casa Branca Bedroom by Alessandra Branca
Samuel Heath Bathroom by Laura Hammett
Visual Comfort & Co. Living Room by Kelly Hoppen CBE
Dedar Library by Pirajean Lees
Drummonds Powder Room by Nicola Harding
Benjamin Moore Dining Room by Peter Mikic
Shepel’ Home Bar by Toni Black of Blacksheep
Hector Finch Snug by Thurstan
Lopen Joinery Kitchen by Ben Pentreath Studio
McKinnon and Harris Garden Terrace by Randle Siddeley
Q: Is there a go-to dish or drink you always serve when friends are over?
From the embossed leather on the walls, allegory painted on the ceiling, and wild roses tumbling through clipped box outside, it is maximalism with manners and a hint of restraint, rich in texture, thought, and legacy. But for me, the most enchanting space was the Library, lined with cedar shelves and so weighted with books that it once threatened to collapse the floor beneath it. That somehow felt like the most glamorous fact of all, a house nearly undone by the weight of its own intellect. Small but mighty, this little library is all-enveloping and felt like a space I’d like to spend hours reading in.
What makes Ham House so extraordinary is how intact it remains. Unlike so many stately homes that were reimagined to suit Victorian or Edwardian tastes, Ham is still very much a 17th-century creation. It is a rare time capsule of life, where the whispers of duchesses and poets still seem to echo through the corridors.
