Peak al fresco? Buzz around Ladbroke Hall grows with designer garden

The arts space and dining destination opened late last year, offering a laissez-faire alternative to stuffy gallery spaces. The brains behind it are business partners Loïc Le Gaillard and Julien Lombrail, founders of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, so named after their sort-of humble beginnings in a former carpenter’s studio in Chelsea.

Ladbroke Hall is now the flagship venue for their brand of design elevated to art — with more than a soupçon of Gallic flair. Built in 1903 as a car factory and showroom for Sunbeam Talbot Motor Company, the Grade II-listed Beaux Arts-style building underwent a £30 million renovation and conversion at the hands of Avanti Architects.

Art lovers can peruse the exhibition programme, enjoy an Italian menu at chef Emanuele Pollini’s eponymous restaurant designed by Vincenzo De Cotiis Architects, or kick back in the bar for Friday night jazz sessions.

With spring well and truly here, Ladbroke Hall is launching an outdoor offering in the form of a garden designed by the highly regarded Tuscan-born, London-based landscape designer Luciano Giubbilei.

“There’s nothing else like this in London, it doesn’t exist. It’s totally magic,” Le Gaillard tells me on a call from — where else? — Tefaf Art Fair in New York.

“A publicly accessible garden is so important to the Ladbroke ecosystem,” he says. “We want to able to show artworks in an outdoor environment.”

From what was once a desultory patch of grass, Giubbilei has created an urban oasis planted with majestic bamboo and trees growing through the brick terrace that will serve as a 70-cover extension of Pollini.

Le Gaillard is determined to bring a continental approach to the post-Brexit British capital. “When you look at some of the most exquisite architecture in the world, like the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, there’s this beautiful relationship between the indoor and outdoor at all times,” he explains.

Designed by Renzo Piano, the art museum in the Black Forest was designed to merge with the landscape. “When we started working on the architecture of Ladbroke Hall, I was adamant that there should be this same connection.” The design is highly personal to Le Gaillard, who briefed Giubbilei to create a garden where he could “play hide-and-seek with my daughter”.

“We wanted a place to show artworks where people could wine and dine,” he says, “but also have little pockets where you discover something.”

Most excitingly for architecture nerds, Ladbroke Hall’s garden will include a 6x6 Maison Démontable by Jean Prouvé — the only publicly accessible one in the UK. Prouvé, a self-taught architect and Le Corbusier collaborator, engineered low-cost prefabricated homes for his fellow French people left homeless by the Second World War.

Now, like many post-war socialist design icons, they are rare collectors’ items; an 8x8 house was on sale at Design Miami in 2013 for $2.5 million (£2 million). At Ladbroke Hall, the compact wooden house will be an artwork that doubles as a private dining space that seats 18 below a branching Frederik Molenschot chandelier. “We had the chance when we found this building to do something special with it,” says Le Gaillard.

The Maison Démontable isn’t for sale, but there are other Prouvé pieces on display that will be available for connoisseur collectors, including a console and dining chairs, as well as a coffee table by Charlotte Perriand, another mid-century French design hero. Sculptures are nestled between the trees and plants in the garden, including bronzes by the late American designer Wendell Castle, and South Korean artist Won-min Park’s steel and stone pieces.

It’s been a two-year process bringing the vision for Ladbroke Hall Garden to life, and Le Gaillard is very excited to share it. “It’s been done with such exquisite taste,” he says. “I can proudly say that I think this is the most outstanding outdoor venue in London.”