When the Soho House team first began considering their first-ever Japanese property in 2019, one challenge stood out above all—given their hybrid members’ club with rooms model, the hospitality brand’s Tokyo outpost would need to be all things to all people.
For long-time members touching down in the Japanese capital, it had to deliver a genuine sense of place, immersing them in the city’s creative scene and offering a taste of the local cuisine. For Tokyoites, meanwhile—especially those of an Anglophile persuasion, given Japan’s long-standing reverence for British tailoring, subcultures, and craft—the appeal lay in the opposite direction. With the wealth of exceptional Japanese restaurants and bars already on their doorstep, they’d be looking for a slice of that louche, convivial London clubbiness (and possibly a Sunday roast). On top of that, private members’ clubs are still a relatively foreign concept in Tokyo: the few equivalents that do exist tend to skew more corporate.
It was a tricky square to circle, but if Soho House Tokyo—which opened its doors this summer in the design-forward neighborhood of Aoyama, just a stone’s throw from the frenetic energy of Omotesando crossing—is anything to go by, they’ve pulled it off. Credit belongs in large part to Soho House design director Domhnall Nolan, a self-professed Japan obsessive whose six-year odyssey began before the pandemic hit and involved years of traveling back and forth to study the country’s vernacular architecture, interiors, and craft traditions. “One key thing we honed in on was Soho House being inherently maximalist and Japan having a reputation for minimalism—with Tokyo specifically having that contrast,” Nolan explains. “It’s a city of juxtaposition where you have beautiful moments of calm, and then it’s also extremely dense and chaotic. Everything we were doing was always thinking about that juxtaposition of a minimal detail, but a maximal execution.”
