Us

Consulting work has spanned luxury hotel groups and property developers, operating at a level where every detail compounds. That work teaches a particular discipline: at the top of the market nothing is fixed with money, because everyone has money. It’s fixed by deciding what a place is for and holding the line on it through a hundred small choices nobody notices individually.

Concept first, then the name, the room, the programme and the price all answering to it. Most venues get built the other way round, which is why they read as a collection of decisions rather than a place, and why they’re impossible to market later without inventing a story that was never true.

He works on the next generation of affluents: how they spend, where they go, and what holds them. Most of that came from building a members’ community from nothing, then watching which reasons people actually turned up for and which ones only sounded good in a deck. Community is the harder half of the job and the part that lasts, because a crowd that belongs to a place doesn’t have to be bought back every season.

Sitting on the brand side of the table means knowing what a company is buying when it funds a room, and what it needs back before it signs again. Grounded in commercial reality through years of running large-scale event productions and time inside the club world, and he trained behind a bar, so he reads a drinks list as a P&L. He is the one who says a night isn’t worth running, usually to Andres, and he loses that argument often enough to know when it’s worth losing.

Found his way into music from there, promoting clubs, then producing his own events with headline talent from around the world. A DJ and a hyper-connected presence in the scene, close enough to the people making the work to know where it’s going before it arrives.

Music is the way in most often, and it isn’t the only one. Food, art, fashion and what’s in the glass all sit in the same place for him, and he moves between them because he came up in a kitchen and left it for the decks without either one replacing the other. What he’s looking for is the same in every case: the thing a room can stand behind, that people want to be seen at, that isn’t already everywhere.

He’s exacting about how it’s executed. A room can have the right booking and still get it wrong, because the system was chosen by someone buying volume rather than listening, or the drink that goes with the night was an afterthought, and the crowd feels the difference without being able to name it. He starts with the detail nobody itemises and builds out from there.

A connector by instinct. Knows how to build a room, and how to turn that room into a community of regulars and quasi-ambassadors who carry the place with them. The artists he books are peers, so they come because he asked rather than because a fee cleared, and they bring the people who follow them rather than an audience rented for the night. The kitchen years never left him: he holds a programme to the standard of a service, and it has to run the same on a wet Tuesday as on a launch night. He pushes for the booking, Mungo pushes back on what it returns, and nothing reaches an owner until both of them agree.

He came up through TBWA and Lowe and Partners in South Africa, designing and art directing for Coca-Cola, South African Breweries, Shell, British American Tobacco, Adidas and Nike. That work has taken Gold and a Grand Prix at the Loeries, two silver Clios, and eight shortlistings across Cannes Lions and D&AD.

Two parts of it carry over directly. He has built corporate identities from nothing, for the pan-African investment bank Imara and for Terra, AfrAsia and SWAN in Mauritius. And he has done drinks, with premium rebrands of Oude Molen brandy and Redd’s cider for SAB, which is packaging design, where a thing has to hold up in a hand and on a shelf rather than on a screen.

In hospitality he has been Design Director across the retained work for Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, and art directed a global campaign for LUX* Resorts & Hotels. He is rebranding two Indian Ocean resort companies now.

A First-Class graduate in Retail Design and Brand Experience from UAL, Sholto has gained experience across luxury retail, design and the arts, including projects with Cartier, Tiffany & Co., Rolex, Urban Revivo in Guangzhou and Browse & Darby. His work brings together spatial strategy, atmosphere and customer experience to create places with lasting impact.