Carmen Pascal / 01 June 2025 / Categories: City, What to see, Media, Magazines

Vogue House is the saddest building in London

I’ve been inside many time, these days I just walk by with a note of nostalgia

I snapped this picture the other day as I walked by a building in London I have been inside many times. For a long time, 65 years it was the central hub for publishing giant Conde Nast and its juggernaut suite of glossy media publications that included high society rag Tatler and fashion’s bastion Vogue.

Since the sale in 2024 it shows me you need a lot more than money to transform such a valuable property and bring it back life. Like this beautiful building now left forlorn and discarded despite its mega price tag of £75 million, £5 million more than the asking price paid over a year ago now. I’d love to ask the new owner Eyal if he loves the building, if it brings him £75 million worth of pleasure?

Personally I’d love to see it being used not just commercially but providing creativity and opportunity once more, attracting not detracting. I remember walking through the doors for the very first time as a young inexperienced model and thinking actually believing in this building I could never be unhappy.

I have an interest in the building I visited many times throughout my career. I used to go through the revolving door always with a spring in my step, people made an effort. It was a thriving publishing and creative hub buzzing and alive and you could guarantee if you parked yourself and sat and watched that door even as someone excluded from that high octane world you’d be sure to catch a glimpse of someone you recognised jumping off the glossy pages of the unattainable for most, straight into real life, absolute magic, a glamour and lifestyle that was actually in touching distance. A place full up with people and brimming with hopefulness.

Conde Nast were and still are in many ways the master manipulators selling the ultimate dream whether it be travel, fashion or lifestyle.

The staff have relocated to a location on the Strand, Adelphia House which for me doesn’t hold the same charisma or aplomb.

The energy chain, the history of the walls, the bricks and mortar, when the walls actually do talk, has been lost to a property portfolio. And this esoteric value, built over 65 years can only be sold once. It’s the thing most don’t see, lost only in the price tag, but that’s just a number on a balance sheet, a perceived value that is not even real. The value for the whole neighbourhood was stolen in one expensive transaction. All the people the building attracted and all the surrounding businesses that benefited from the long standing history and reputation, lost.

I think this has happened all over London, a city I love and now call home after my first Love Paris.

When you take away the purpose and diversity, you sell off more than just a building you sell off the story and the energy.

We’ve seen Shepherds Market close by, cobbled streets once a thriving bustling hub of family run restaurants and small independents transform into expensive properties taken over by chains and conglomerates all for top dollar and in doing so the appeal for the commoners, the many not the few, and I include myself in this description is completely lost.

I fear if our lively vibrant cities continue down this road of seeing only cash wealth in these iconic buildings instead of places put to good use for the benefit of jobs and prosperity for everyone we’ll end up only looking in: all of us being excluded like “fortress like” gated guarded mansions so affluent and separate a revolution will tear them all down.

I find myself asking what is the point of owning a gorgeous building like this unless it’s alive, open, light and airy full of people doing amazing things just like it once was.