Basic.Space Lands in London for June 2026
The cult IRL-to-URL shopping destination and owner of Design Miami, makes its international debut at The Old Selfridges Hotel, with a roster spanning Rick Owens, Carpenters Workshop Gallery and Tame Impala’s synth lab.
Photography, Monument, Basic.Space London 2026
There is a particular kind of building that London does better than anywhere: the grand space gone gloriously to seed. The Old Selfridges Hotel a cavernous, raw-edged hall tucked behind the Oxford Street flagship, directly above the Food Hall, is exactly that. Over the years it has hosted the ICA, Frieze projects and a celebrated survey of London subculture from post-punk to the present. This June, it takes on a new tenant for three days, and the choice of address tells you almost everything about the ambition behind it.
On 13–14 June 2026, with an invite-only preview the evening before, Basic.Space stages its first event outside the United States. For the uninitiated, Basic.Space is the obsessively curated digital marketplace — part 1stDibs, part private club, that has spent the past few years quietly rewiring how a certain kind of collector buys design, art and fashion.In 2023 it acquired Design Miami, the pre-eminent global fair for collectible design, in an all-stock deal that made its founder Jesse Lee chairman of the board. Its IRL editions in Los Angeles and New York have become pilgrimage sites for the design-literate. London is the next move and, pointedly, its first beyond home soil.
Why London, why now
Photography, Clear Orchid - Artic - Telepathic Instruments, Basic.Space London 2026. Courtesy of Telepathic Instruments.
Photography, left AB+AC & Right Kleinian, Stone in Focus, 2026 - PLATFORM, Basic.Space London 2026.
The pitch, in Lee’s telling, is cultural rather than commercial. London has long been a city where subcultures don’t just survive but propagate — the precise sort of creative cross-pollination that Basic.Space exists to champion. It’s a neat fit: a platform built on discovery, arriving in the city that arguably invented modern street-level reinvention, and doing so in a venue with subculture quite literally written into its exhibition history.
Discovery has always been at the forefront of our mission, and no city represents this ethos better than London - a breeding ground for the kind of creative cross-pollination that we champion. Jesse Lee, Founder of Basic.space & Chairman of Design Miami.
The London edition takes its cues from its industrial setting and from the UK’s history of subversive underground culture, organised around four pillars — design, art, fashion and sound. The programme is produced in partnership with creative director Juliana Salazar, and the curation leans, deliberately, into the local.
The four pillars
Photography left, Jabez Bartlett. Right, Illya Goldman Gubin, Basic.Space London 2026.
i Design. The collectible-design heavyweight Carpenters Workshop Gallery presents works set to include pieces by Rick Owens, Karl Lagerfeld, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé — a lineage that runs from mid-century master to contemporary provocateur.
ii Art. PLATFORM: the art and artist-collaboration commerce destination Basic.Space acquired in 2025 — curates an exhibition with London galleries including Nicoletti and Albion Jeune, alongside artists active in the city.
iii Fashion. Artist and designer Samuel Ross anchors a strongly British contingent, joined by gallerist Max Radford, designer Lewis Kemmenoe, production designer Jabez Bartlett, and Loewe Craft Prize finalist Jobe Burns.
iv Sound. Telepathic Instruments — the Western Australia music-tech outfit founded by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and friends, debuts a limited-edition transparent version of its chord-based synthesizer. A reminder that, here, sound is treated as design object.
A roster without borders
Photography, Jabez Bartlett, Basic.Space London 2026.
Beyond the home talent, the guest list reads like a map of where contemporary design actually lives now: Berlin-based designer Illya Goldman Gubin; multidisciplinary artist and designer Marcin Rusak; the UAE’s Roham Shamekh; Paris-and-Seoul artist Nara Lee; Melbourne-and-LA painter Nick Thomm; and jewellery-and-homeware label Completed Works, among a deep line-up that stretches to Björk and Berries, Béton Brut, Galerie Chenel and beyond. It is, characteristically, less a trade fair than a feed made physical, a three-dimensional rendering of the platform’s scroll.
That is the real Basic.Space sleight of hand, and the reason the London debut matters beyond a single weekend in Marylebone. The model collapses the distance between seeing and owning: every object on the floor is shoppable, the room functioning as a showroom for a marketplace that never closes. For a generation that increasingly treats design objects the way an earlier one treated watches or couture, as the truest signal of taste, it is a potent format.
Photography, Marcin Rusak Studio, Basic.Space London 2026.
Saturday 13 & Sunday 14 June 2026
11am – 7pm, The Old Selfridges Hotel, 1 Orchard St, London W1H 6HJ
For more information visit Basic.Space
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