Liberty

When Arthur Lasenby Liberty dreamed of docking a ship laden with exotic goods in the heart of London, he got his wish, posthumously. The mock-Tudor building completed in 1924 was constructed from over 24,000 cubic feet of timber salvaged from two Royal Navy warships: HMS Impregnable (once the largest wooden ship ever built for the Navy, framed from 3,040 hundred-year-old oaks felled in the New Forest) and HMS Hindustan. The store’s Great Marlborough Street frontage measures exactly the length of the Hindustan, while its floors are the ships’ original decks. Arthur never saw his nautical fantasy realized. He died in 1917, five years before construction even began.

The building’s origin story goes back further than the ships. Liberty opened his first shop on Regent Street in 1875, in his early thirties, selling ornamental goods from Japan and the East at a moment when Victorian Britain still treated Eastern design as a curiosity rather than a source of style. That early bet on Japanese aesthetics is what eventually funded a store elaborate enough to be built like a mansion instead of a shop, complete with fireplaces, atriums, and a three-story archway spanning from Carnaby Street to Kingly Street, a domestic fantasy disguised as retail, floating on the bones of two decommissioned warships.