Designed by Seoul-based Steve Oh and opened on Poland Street, the new Palace Skateboards flagship uses stained glass, industrial materials and fragments of the brand’s history to go beyond simple display. It shows how retail can build a sense of belonging without imitating a museum.
The new Palace Skateboards store makes no attempt to look neutral. The Palace Soho flagship opened on November 5, 2026 at 8 Poland Street, in the heart of London’s Soho, and it puts the London brand’s personality on show from the first step: a black-and-white marble floor that recalls the original Brewer Street shop, industrial surfaces paired with pale woods, bespoke furniture and a large stained-glass window that turns Palace’s graphic irony into something almost ceremonial. It is a flagship, but also a walk-through archive and a place to linger.
The opening was confirmed by the official Palace store page, which lists the address and opening hours. Editorial coverage published by Wallpaper* on November 4 credits the design to Steve Oh: it is the Seoul-based designer’s first European project and, for Palace, its only store outside Asia spread over two floors. An independent report by Hypebeast gives the floor area as roughly 250.6 square meters and confirms the public opening date.
An enfilade that tells the Palace story
The long, narrow floor plan could easily have produced a predictable retail sequence. Instead, Oh divides it into a series of consecutive rooms, much like a museum enfilade, giving each one a different density of materials and objects. Exposed concrete and galvanized steel form the rougher base layer; light oak paneling, parquet, marble and white walls bring in a register that is part domestic, part institutional. The large windows and skylights at the back become a way of orienting visitors, not just a source of daylight.
The museum reference does not, however, mean a static display case. Skateboards are set into columns or arranged on mirrored surfaces, while archive photographs, salvaged objects and custom-designed furniture combine display with everyday use. The seating echoes, in cross-section, the Tri-Ferg, the triangular logo created by Fergus Purcell. The stained-glass window, made by Scottish studio Pavilion Pavilion, brings skeletal praying hands, Gothic lettering and the figure-eight motif into the architecture. The irony is still easy to read, but it is entrusted to slow, permanent craftsmanship.
Some elements say more than any applied graphic could. A Rolls-Royce grille from the restaurant owned by co-founder Lev Tanju’s grandfather had already appeared in the old store; it now returns alongside a bench that preserves the memory of the Victoria Benches, the skaters’ meeting point in Christchurch Gardens that was removed from public space in 2019. A fragment of the city thus enters the store and stops being mere memorabilia: it can be touched, used and recognized by anyone who shares that history.
From display to permanence: why the Palace Soho flagship matters
The project matters now because physical retail can no longer justify itself simply by having products in stock. Collections are bought online; what a store can offer is a relationship between people, objects and memory that a screen cannot reproduce. Palace responds without turning the space into a high-tech theme park. Even the LED wall that visually links the two floors is just one component among many, while most of the narrative weight rests on floors, seating, stained glass and artifacts.
For commercial interior designers, the interesting shift is from a coordinated identity to a layered one. The new London flagship does not roll out a format identical to Palace’s international locations. It takes a recognizable palette (mirror, metal, marble, oak, concrete) and relates it to London, to the brand’s previous address and to the local skate culture. The strategy can be replicated in method, not in image: decide which elements must guarantee continuity and which can grow out of the place itself.
The same logic separates a living archive from a nostalgic stage set. Objects from the past work when they keep a verifiable link to the brand’s people and practices; chosen only to create atmosphere, they become decoration. Here, the history of Brewer Street, the Victoria Benches and the nod to the Southbank, where Palace was born, add substance to the space because they belong to a real community. It marks an evolution of the store as a cultural device, a theme that also runs through the history of department stores and their relationship with design, but on a more intimate, participatory scale.
One useful tension remains worth watching: when a commercial interior borrows the language of a museum or a place of worship, it can turn a brand into an authority and a community into an audience. Palace softens that risk with seating, room to meet and fragments that invite use. The result does not erase the store’s retail function, but places it within a broader story. In Soho, the most convincing move is not the spectacular object: it is the decision to let the store accumulate time, rather than presenting itself as if it had just been born.
