As for Gelardin: despite being a fixture of the music and fashion industries for years—working on everything from Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl LI Halftime Show to Louis Vuitton catwalk extravaganzas—this marks her first foray into the hospitality world. Among her tasks as Broadwick Soho’s creative director? Translating carefully preserved family photos onto knick-knacks dotted throughout the hotel’s common areas. Take the matchboxes at Flute, each of which is emblazoned with an image of Noel Sr doing magic tricks for his guests a full four decades ago. “There’s a real mix of high and ‘low’ throughout,” Andrea says. “We’ve got car boot sale finds next to Francis Bacons, Bridget Rileys, Howard Hodgkins…”
As for how she paid tribute to “the characters of Soho”? “This is a project conceived by a group of friends, really, and conveniently, one of those friends happens to be Jamie Poulton, the co-founder of Randall & Aubin, whose parents and grandparents all owned businesses nearby,” Gelardin notes with a laugh. “He’s so up on the history of the neighborhood, which has helped us so much.” Meanwhile, she took herself off to the BFI archives to study footage of Soho in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s (“we’ve actually licensed clips from the documentary Sunshine in Soho for our website”) and incorporated aesthetic nods to “the neons, sex shops, and theatres” that define the area at every turn.