What Nuno Mendes did next: Shoreditch's Blue Mountain School

The first lesson you learn upon entering Blue Mountain School - a new project in Shoreditch over six floors of a 19th century building - is that this is no ordinary enterprise. It is not a shop, though things may be bought; and it is not a gallery, though there is an exhibition space, currently occupied by the wall hangings of Alexis Gautier, woven by women in Nepal.

The esteemed perfumier Lyn Harris – her wares displayed on a bespoke concrete and terrazzo table – has a base here, as does the hand-made furniture outfit BDDW, the go-to people for a statement bronze armoire. This is their first outlet outside the US.

You could, should you wish, acquire both scents and interior décor, or you could just sniff around their spaces before popping upstairs for a multi-course tasting menu at Maos. This is the latest project from Nuno Mendes, the Portuguese chef who first invited us to dine in near darkness at Viajantes in Bethnal Green, and then went on to feed celebrities raw red prawns and crab doughnuts at the Chiltern Firehouse.

Every evening Mendes caters to just 14, who book (and pay) in advance, and can eat around a huge oak table or standing up in the kitchen if they so wish. It’s currently full until the end of May.

You might have gathered by now that James Brown and Christie Fels, the couple behind Blue Mountain School, are rather more concerned with experience than hard-nosed retail. Most visitors will be guided around the building by one of its 15 staff, and Brown reckons that 45 minutes or an hour is the average stay time.

“It’s not for everyone,” he avers of a process that requires ringing on a doorbell after locating the building’s silvery grey fa?ade on the corner of Chance and Redchurch Streets. But it will delight those in search of more lingering pleasures like looking at high-end ceramics or listening to underground music (darkwave, anyone?) chosen by Hackney-based record store Low Company and played in a specially designed “listening room” on the top floor.

Brown opened the first Hostem store in 2010 on this site when Redchurch Street was still halfway between its old grime and its new glamour. It was brave and precocious – Brown was just 22 – but Hostem became known as a destination for those seeking a new spin on luxury fashion,  as Brown filled the ground floor with unusual and expensive - mostly black - clothes.

Now the whole building has been imaginatively opened up by 6a Architects and the Hostem archive – an accumulation of around 100 extraordinary artisanal-luxe garments gathered by Brown and Fels over the intervening eight years – is installed in the basement in elegant steel archive cases complete with huge wheels that allow them to be rolled apart in order to view the contents within.

Some pieces, such as those by weaver Amy Revier, can take nearly a year to make. Others include one-off works by American designer Thom Browne and the earliest collections of London-based rising star John Alexander Skelton. Passers-by can look down from the street into this treasure trove of timelessness. “We wanted the building to be both open and private at the same time,” says Brown of the arrangement.

Stephanie Macdonald and Tom Emerson of 6a have a reputation for working sensitively in old buildings – not least for the gallery they created out of two Huguenot houses in Raven Row in nearby Spitalfields. But here they have been able to take greater liberties.

“The interior had been fairly knocked about already,” says Emerson, “and there were already two double-height spaces that we decided to keep.” As a result the floors are a puzzling interlocking arrangement of vertical and horizontal spaces bound together by a monumental staircase made entirely in roughly hewn oak.

“James had these huge sections of wood that he wanted to use. It was raw, and unmilled and full of knots,” says Emerson. “We didn’t design the staircase, so much as make endless prototypes to see how it would hold up and go around corners.”

The entire interior developed organically, through conversations and on-site eventualities. “One day we came in and the builders had put a slightly greenish, moisture-resistant MDF in the doors as a temporary measure. But James decided he liked it,” says Emerson, so the MDF stayed.

“There was a lot of improvisation, the design was never signed off, as it would be on a normal project,” says Emerson. Internal walls are finished in the most basic red building plaster, with a trowelled, textured surface. The effect: Redchurch Street rustic.  

Two floors on the upper levels, however, had already been completed a couple of years earlier by Valentin Loellmann. A German designer based in Maastrich, Loellmann’s furniture has an almost fairytale quality, like illustrations in a children’s book. Tables, seating, counters and stools are oversized and soft-edged, in charred wood with brass edges. After a long incubation these rooms are finally on show.

In 2001, 6a designed the interior of a store called Oki-Ni in Savile Row – a landscape of piled up felt slabs for a shop didn’t actually sell anything on the spot. Limited edition items could be tried on and then ordered online and despatched to the buyer’s address. It was one of the first, though somewhat subverted, forays into internet retail.  

Blue Mountain School is one of a kind too, a place of experience and imagination. A little bit precious, yes, but somewhere to slow things down and savour the ultimate luxury that is neither expensive fashion or fancy food but time to linger.

M?os is now booking May through June 30 2018, maos.dinesuperb.com, Blue Mountain School, 9 Chance Street, London E2 7JB?, bluemountain.school