A pub, a fishmonger, a hotel (or two) and a private members club are all part of Swiss retailers Iwan and Manuela Wirth’s growing hotel empire, which will expand further next year with the launch of a restaurant and bar in New York. -their first in the city.
Located on Wooster Street, in the heart of Soho’s Cast Iron District, the restaurant will sit across from a new Hauser & Wirth space, which will open this fall. This will be the mega gallery’s third location in New York. Details of his first exhibition have yet to be announced.
The New York restaurant will be the tenth business to open as part of the Wirths’ Artfarm business. Launched in 2014, it now employs nearly 500 people worldwide. The group is also the majority shareholder of the private club Groucho in Soho, London, which was acquired for £40m last August, but is managed separately from the Artfarm portfolio.
While the art world is no stranger to late-night drinking spots, the idea of mega-merchants getting into the hotel business may seem anomalous to some. But, according to Ewan Venters, who was named managing director of Hauser & Wirth and Artfarm in 2019, the merger of the two companies is a “very nice cut”. At the heart of both, he says, is a “passionate belief in the role of art, community, food and people – and finding common ground where these things work really well together”. Venters, who was previously general manager of the luxury department store Fortnum & Mason, is also a director of the Groucho Club.
Artfarm’s portfolio has grown rapidly since its first offering: Hauser & Wirth Somerset in Durslade, a former working farm outside the village of Bruton. “Iwan and Manuela thought if they were going to create a whole new destination in the South West of England, and its origins are a farm, why wouldn’t they develop a restaurant as part of that experience?” , explains Venters. “Being gallery owners first and foremost was not just about opening a restaurant, it was about opening a work of art. This is how the Dieter Roth bar was designed.
Most produce is locally sourced and can be purchased from a farm shop in Durslade. “It’s basically about supporting local producers – that’s really important to its success. It is used by as many locals as gallery visitors,” explains Venters. Since last year, over a million people have visited the Somerset Gallery.
Since the launch of Manuela, an art-filled restaurant that opened in late 2016 in the Hauser & Wirth gallery complex in downtown Los Angeles, there have been a string of openings. Last September, the Wirths opened Audley Public House and Mount St Restaurant and Rooms in Mayfair, their first London venture, which boasts more than 200 works of art. Much like the New York facility, the pub offers dealers a place to entertain close to their Savile Row gallery and flagship space on South Audley Street, which is due to open next year.
Away from the art world, Artfarm last month opened the Fish Shop, a restaurant and fishmonger in Ballater on Royal Deeside, Scotland. Serving ethically sourced fish and seafood and biodynamic, low-carbon wines from British and European vineyards as well as local beers and spirits, the small 40-seat restaurant is housed in a building that the King Charles saved and restored with funds from the Prince’s Foundation. after the floods that devastated the region in 2016.
King Charles and Queen Camilla were among the first to visit the fish market before it officially opened on April 29. The King also opened Artfarm’s sister property, the Fife Arms, in nearby Braemar in 2019. The hotel has 46 rooms and suites (a night in a Royal Suite can cost you between £1,500 and £2). £500) as well as 16,000 works of art, from works by Picasso, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray and Lucian Freud, to Victorian ephemera and objects.
“The Fish Shop has no relationship to the gallery in any context,” Venters says, noting that the restaurant was born out of “a real need for visitors to [the Fife Arms] want to go somewhere else”. The adjoining fish market is open 5 days a week and offers fresh fish and seafood to locals as well as to the restaurant.
Artfarm is targeting another hotel at Bretton Hall, on the site of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In 2019, Leeds-based property company Rushbond appointed Artfarm as operator-partner of the site, to take the “creative and operational direction” of the development, although negotiations appear to be ongoing. Venters says Artfarm invested significantly in the Grade II listed mansion, which housed Bretton Hall College until 2001 when it closed, to save it from dereliction.
“We don’t independently control the schedule or what’s going to happen, but we have a good active dialogue,” Venters says. “But like many of these big, ambitious projects, in a post-Covid environment and with the cost of construction projects rising, everything needs to be reassessed.”
Nevertheless, Artfarm is getting better and better, so will it ever overtake the gallery sector? “Never is a dangerous word, but the element of hospitality is not central to Iwan and Manuela’s world,” Venters says. “Marc Payot [Hauser & Wirth’s president], Iwan and Manuela are above all gallery owners. It’s their passion, it’s their love and it’s what they focus on.
