Palace Opens Two-Floor Soho Flagship Designed as a Museum of Skate History

Palace Skateboards has opened a two-floor flagship in London's Soho, the brand's only store outside Asia to span two levels and its most explicit attempt yet to archive 17 years of skate-driven design history. Lev Tanju and Gareth Skewis, who met skating around the Southbank Centre and founded the label in 2009, commissioned Seoul-based designer Steve Oh for the project — his first-ever job in Europe and his latest in a working relationship that already covers Palace's stores across Asia.

The space at 8 Poland Street replaces none of the brand's earlier presence in the neighbourhood. Palace opened its first physical retail location a decade ago on nearby Brewer Street and has since launched more than ten stores globally, in New York, Seoul, Tokyo, LA and Shanghai, each tailored to its city with locally sourced materials and cultural references. "There's always a subtle influence of each city within the design," Skewis said.

How does the store reference the brand's past?

Oh visited the long, narrow unit, with its huge windows and skylights flooding the rear with natural light, and reached for a museum analogy. "I immediately noticed that it feels like the Great Court in the British Museum," he said. He divided the floor plan into a series of connected rooms, akin to a museum enfilade, each with a distinct balance drawn from Palace's palette of mirrors, brushed stainless steel, white marble, oak and exposed concrete.

The references run specific. The entrance recreates the black-and-white marble floor of the original Brewer Street store. A Rolls-Royce grille that once hung in Tanju's grandfather's restaurant was relocated into the new space. A life-size portrait of Elizabeth II presides over the fitting room, where Oh deliberately spends his design effort. "The fitting room is usually the last thing that people focus on," he said. "But I always try to do something surprising or unique in each one."

Notably absent is the bulldog statue that has appeared in various guises across many of the global stores.

What sacred elements did Palace install?

At the rear, a huge window carries stained glass panels designed by Palace and crafted by Scottish studio Pavilion Pavilion. The motifs include praying skeleton hands, gothic typography and a figure-of-eight symbol repeated on the front door handle. "We do quite a lot of religious tongue-in-cheek twists," Tanju said. "It's funny for us to have an expensive joke, but it also makes the space feel a bit sacred."

Oh also designed benches and stools whose legs resemble the Tri-Ferg logo — the Penrose-triangle mark created by graphic designer Fergus Purcell — in profile, forms that read as minimalist pews.

Where do the Victoria Benches fit in?

The store also preserves a piece of London skate history. The "Victoria Benches" were a legendary skateboarding spot in Christchurch Gardens, next to the former New Scotland Yard, until anti-skaters forced their removal in 2019. Tanju and Skewis rescued a set. "These things are as important as, say, Lord's cricket ground, if you like cricket," Skewis said. One bench now sits in the store for customers to touch; two more are installed at Manor Place, the free indoor skatepark and community sports hub that Palace and Nike opened last year in a restored 19th-century bathhouse in south London.

Both projects serve a strategy the founders state plainly: community building. "When we opened the first store, at the end of the day, we would shut the shop and drink in the back room with the staff," Tanju said. "We still want to make a space where people hang out."

For retailers watching Palace's arc — collaborations with Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Stella Artois and Rizla, and guest editorship of the October 2026 issue — the Soho store signals where the brand is heading: retail as institutional archive, with seasonal collections and weekly drops presented inside a space designed to outlast any single season.