Soho House Greek Street, the original, opened above Café Boheme on 17 January 1995. Nick Jones had been running the restaurant downstairs and decided the floor above it should be a private room for people in the creative trades. There was no membership committee in the institutional sense — Jones knew the names. The annual subscription was £250. The model worked, then it travelled, and then it kept travelling, and somewhere between the New York opening in 2003 and the IPO of 2021 it stopped being the thing it had been built to be.
The membership figures tell the structural story. Soho House had roughly 127,800 members at the IPO in July 2021 and roughly 267,494 by the third quarter of 2024 — a doubling in three years, across a property estate that has now passed forty-two houses. The Hollywood Reporter and Sherwood News have both reported, at length, on the resulting pressure: the membership cull of 2023-24 across New York, Los Angeles and London, the application freezes in the three flagship cities, the public emails from Jones acknowledging that the houses no longer felt the way they were supposed to feel. The IPO had required growth. The growth had broken the proposition. The two things were not reconcilable on a public-company timeline.
The August 2025 take-private deal — MCR Investors and Ashton Kutcher's consortium leading a $2.7 billion delisting — was the structural admission. Soho House as a publicly traded growth story did not work. Soho House as a privately held membership institution, with the discipline to refuse the next twenty openings and to recover the curation of the current forty-two, might. The bet is being made by operators who have, in MCR's case, run hotels at scale and, in Kutcher's case, observed the platform from the inside as a long-standing member. Jones, who departed the executive role in 2022 after his cancer diagnosis, remains a shareholder. The founding intent is being deliberately reasserted.
What is happening to the membership in the meantime is more interesting than the corporate manoeuvre. The 2024 cohort that joined the new generation of competitor clubs — ZZ's, Casa Cipriani, the Twenty Two in London, Casa Tua's expanded footprint — is, in many cases, the cohort that aged out of Soho House at thirty-five or forty. The Greek Street kitchen still works. The Shoreditch House rooftop still works. But the principal who used to take three dinners a week at the Notting Hill house now takes one — and takes the other two at addresses where the room is smaller, the door is harder, and the per-evening cost is, in relative terms, no longer absurd by comparison.
The Soho House response, under private ownership, will turn on two questions. The first is whether the membership cap holds in the flagship cities — a structural commitment, not a marketing one, that removes the option of growth as a default. The second is whether the next opening cycle slows from the current pace of three to four houses a year to something closer to one. Both questions are answerable. Neither was answerable under the public-company structure that the operators have just spent $2.7 billion to dismantle.
The Greek Street room turned thirty in January. The institution it spawned is, by some measure, the most successful private club business in modern history. Whether it remains a club, in the sense Jones meant the word in 1995, is the question the next eighteen months will answer.
— Camille Vedy
