Design and fit-out of Vintage Salt, a seasonal rooftop seafood restaurant and bar for Selfridges on Oxford Street — conceived as a fully circular, low-waste hospitality environment capable of transitioning between summer and winter themes without strip-out, replacement, or significant capital expenditure.
Vintage Salt sits atop one of the world’s most iconic department stores, looking out over the rooftops of central London. Commissioned by Selfridges as a destination dining experience, the restaurant draws its identity not from Oxford Street, but from the Devon and Cornish coastline — the landscape that informs Sibley Grove’s own design philosophy. Dressing pieces sourced directly from working fishermen, authentic coastal details, and the raw textures of the British shoreline gave the space a genuineness that no trend-led scheme could replicate.
The central design challenge was seasonal flexibility. Vintage Salt operates as a summer destination and a winter venue, with distinct atmospheres required for each. Rather than designing for a single iteration — and accepting the waste and cost of periodic strip-out — Sibley Grove designed a space built for change from the outset. The principle was straightforward: make the permanent elements truly permanent, and make the transitional elements genuinely easy to change.
The kitchen and bar were designed to be easily reclad between seasons, allowing the visual character of each space to shift dramatically without touching the infrastructure beneath. Furniture was selected and reused across seasons and themes rather than replaced, substantially reducing carbon emissions, material waste, and capital expenditure with each transition. The timber floor was specified and installed to be sanded and refinished repeatedly — delivering a completely refreshed surface without removal or replacement, and preserving the material value of the timber across multiple lifecycles. VOC-free paints were used throughout, allowing surfaces to be refreshed in hours rather than days.
The result is a rooftop restaurant that can be genuinely reinvented season after season — in atmosphere, in palette, in character — while the bones of the space remain in continuous use. Vintage Salt demonstrates that a high-profile, design-led hospitality environment can be both commercially agile and materially responsible, without compromising on the quality of the guest experience.
Project Delivery: 2016
Location: London, UK
