SCP Leaves Shoreditch After 40 Years for a New Clerkenwell Green Showroom
British furniture brand SCP has closed its long running Shoreditch showroom and opened a new home in a five storey Clerkenwell Green townhouse. Founder Sheridan Coakley says the move reflects how the trade side of the business now works.
SCP has swapped postcodes. After four decades on Curtain Road, the British furniture and lighting brand founded by Sheridan Coakley in 1985 has opened a new showroom at 16 Clerkenwell Green, a five storey townhouse built in the 1980s that now anchors the company's London presence. The move, first reported by Wallpaper*, closes a chapter that began when Shoreditch was still an unfashionable corner of east London and SCP was among the first design retailers to bet on it.
The new building has been fitted out floor by floor rather than treated as a single showroom. The basement now houses the lighting department, while the top floor has been staged as a full apartment, complete with kitchen and bathroom, so customers can see furniture and textiles in a lived in setting rather than on a shop floor. Coakley worked with Nice Projects designers Simone McEwan and Sacha Leong on the interior, along with long time SCP lighting collaborator Jon Harrison.
The stock reflects SCP's usual mix of in house design and curated imports, including ceramics from Italy's Bitossi Ceramiche, seating from Swedish brand Kallemo, Danish pieces from Gubi, woven textiles from London's Shore Studios, and vases by Martino Gamper. Italian kitchen brand Very Simple Kitchen is launching in the UK through the new space, and SCP's own manufacturing still runs through a Norfolk upholstery factory that opened in 2003, well before the brand had a stake in Selfridges' furniture hall. Coakley's own track record is arguably the more significant story here. Over four decades he helped launch the careers of Jasper Morrison, Matthew Hilton, and Konstantin Grcic, and brought Philippe Starck's work to the UK market before either name carried the weight they do today.
Clerkenwell has quietly become one of London's more serious design postcodes, with a concentration of showrooms and studios that makes it a natural trade destination rather than a passing retail street. "I hope it's not too fashionable," said Sheridan Coakley of the new space, a fittingly understated line from a retailer who built a business on restraint rather than spectacle. The showroom keeps a mix of contemporary and vintage pieces rather than leaning fully into either.
For a brand that has spent forty years shaping how Britain buys design led furniture, the move to Clerkenwell reads less like reinvention and more like consolidation. The new SCP showroom is open now on Clerkenwell Green, with the trade side of the business continuing to operate through the company's professional department.
