Loïc Le Gaillard on Building Ladbroke Hall: Where Culture Meets Community

What happens when a gallery stops selling objects and starts selling stories? Loïc Le Gaillard and his business partner Julien Lombrail are testing that question at Ladbroke Hall, their west London space that deliberately resists singular definition. Two years after opening, the duo have created something that functions simultaneously as gallery, bar and restaurant, performance venue, jazz club and community hub.

The former Sunbeam Talbot car factory hosts exhibitions of collectable design and objets d’art by Carpenters Workshop Gallery – also founded by Le Gaillard and Lombrail in 2006. The programming is deliberately eclectic, spotlighting designers and artists from across the globe: Paul Cocksedge, Marcin Rusak, Maarten Baas, fashion and furniture designer Rick Owens, to name a few.

In the Gambero Rosso Three Forchette-rated Pollini restaurant, conversations unfold beneath Nacho Carbonell’s fantastical cocoon chandelier, surrounded by paintings artist Christopher Le Brun created especially for the space. Meanwhile in the garden, landscaped by Chelsea Flower Show winner Luciano Giubbilei, fantastical sculptures by the Rotterdam collective Atelier Van Lieshout sit and stand among the tall bamboo and the Prouvé House, a wooden shack that simply salutes the modernist visionary.

At night, the sunken Sunbeam Theatre lights up to stage a host of acts from Grammy-winning pianists to emerging jazz quartets, climate activists, poets and writers, attracting an audience as diverse in age and income as this area of London. There’s even a Sanctum fitness session designed to connect body and mind. Above all, Ladbroke Hall has strived to be a genuine community hub: one that hosts 120-plus events annually, from intimate author readings to raucous local celebrations.

The latest act takes this further. The Sunbeam Project charity is reimagining what cultural spaces can offer when they break down the barriers that make art and design feel inaccessible.

To understand more, we sat down with Le Gaillard to reflect on their journey, the challenges of maintaining this hybrid identity, and why he believes culture has a responsibility in making society function.

When we met at the opening in 2023, you described Ladbroke Hall as moving beyond the ‘transactional gallery model’. Two years on, how has the reality surprised you?

I generally think that the art world ecosystem is shifting and it’s not about buying an expensive painting or an expensive coffee table. It’s got to be way beyond this. There is got to be an experience and successful, well-off people want more than the objects. They want a story. So my job as a gallerist is to move from selling beautiful expensive objects into becoming a beautiful storyteller.

Two years down the line now, the idea is very clear. And it took some time to define what Ladbroke Hall should be, what the vision behind it should be, what the purpose should be – the purpose for the business and also the purpose on a personal basis. It always comes back to the why. Why are we doing this?

Why are you doing this?

Julien and I, on a personal level, reached our limit in terms of the emotion that the art industry can give you. We are aesthetes and we have a genuine love of beautiful things, whatever they are. It could be architecture, it could be design, it could be art, it could be food, it could be opera, it could be jazz, it could be poetry reading, it could be contemporary dance. All these beautiful things which make Art with a capital A.

It was clear that within Ladbroke Hall, we could potentially give it a go at celebrating all these forms of artistic expression. Our events have ranged from the Grammy Award winner Gonzalo Rubalcaba to Lang Lang playing and Wayne McGregor performing dance. Those special moments are relevant for us because they feed us emotionally, and it is a beautiful counterpart to an art market that can sometimes be complicated and hostile.

The Sunbeam Project marks your formal charitable status. What’s the purpose behind it?

The purpose of the Sunbeam Project is threefold. The first one is equal opportunity to artists, whoever they are. As long as they are talented, we put together 360-degree curated events of culture, of talks, so Ladbroke Hall becomes a stage but also a place for intellectuals to share ideas or where debates can happen.

The second thing, which is probably the most important, is to make sure that this culture that we curate is available and open to everybody. That culture and curated culture is not only for white, middle-aged privileged people. That it’s for everybody. When we acknowledge that culture has got such an important responsibility in making a society function, creating joy, creating bonding, then we need to make sure that whatever culture we create or show here is open to everybody.

The third point is to make sure that Ladbroke Hall is also a place for the community – to remind them that this building belongs to them as much as it belongs to us.

How do you break down those barriers when culture can feel so intimidating?

When you’ve never been offered beauty or culture, it’s incredibly intimidating. Even when you invite the community to come in, it can be scary. And that’s precisely what we don’t want. I want these young kids to come in and think that this world is accessible to them, to feel this could be their job tomorrow. If there’s one kid who comes and knocks on my door 10 years from now and says, ‘You know what, Loïc, I came to one thing, and this changed my life’… if there’s one kid, I would say that our mission is a success.

How do you curate such a wide range of programming while maintaining a coherent identity?

It is like a gallery. You have the gallery’s funnel, where you put many kinds of artists, movements, ideas, colours, and you need to create a juice. And this juice needs to be consistent, needs to be thorough. Whatever is not off the table – it could be any form of expression as long as you get some of the best people in their field.

As someone who lives locally I visit quite a bit for the art and design, but also for the music, the great food and enchanting gardens. What does this model offer that traditional gallery spaces can’t?

What surprised me, but also doesn’t surprise me, is the fact that a lot of people and a lot of the patrons are extremely emotionally attached to Ladbroke Hall and the project. It is a special place for them. They realise that we give a lot. That it is a generous place, where the staff is generous, the curation is generous. They feel that it doesn’t have this traditional transactional feel about the place.

Did I ever imagine it to be as vibrant as it has become? Apart from my wife and Julien, I was the only one who believed it could work. So many people said it was a crazy idea. The journey is still long to be totally successful, at least financially. We are doing well, but we could do better. But I also know, no I am convinced, when the product is good, when the people are honest and kind, it can only be a success. It’s just a question of time.

How does Pollini, the restaurant, function within your broader vision?

We have beautiful, honest cuisine, and it goes way beyond the fresh pasta. It’s also looking at the colours, the plates, how much weight there is in the cutlery; making sure the ingredients are sourced locally where possible, that we use sustainable meat. It’s about making sure everything is in line with the concept – our values.

Economically, it’s complicated, though, since it’s very expensive to serve good food and vegetables in the UK. But we couldn’t do it any other way. We want to make sure that the ceremony of lunch or dinner is an important one, and that when you come here, we genuinely deliver.

What do you hope Ladbroke Hall’s cultural impact will be in the long term?

When you look back at Studio 54, for instance, and how much impact it had on culture in the 1970s, even into the 80s – a place, a location, at a given time can have an incredibly strong impact on shaping the culture of society globally. I would love it if in ten years’ time, once the curation has fully taken shape, we could speak of Ladbroke Hall as having the same impact, even though the expression of art is totally different.

In a society which I consider quite sick at the moment, we need to keep pushing and being generous and offering culture as a remedy to maintain faith in a better life, and to remain resilient through these challenging moments.