In Berkeley Square, provenance is part of the conversation. For six days this autumn, collectors, designers, dealers, and art lovers will gather beneath LAPADA’s pavilion in the heart of Mayfair, moving between objects whose histories span centuries and specialists who have spent careers learning how to read them.
The LAPADA Berkeley Square Fair returns October 27 to November 1, 2026, bringing together nearly 100 international dealers in fine art, antiques, jewelry, furniture, sculpture, decorative arts, and design. Every object offered at the Fair is independently examined by LAPADA’s committee of more than 70 specialist experts.
Exceptional objects and the knowledge behind them have always been central to LAPADA. This year, it feels especially relevant.
The Value of the Expert Eye
We live in a moment of almost unlimited access. An object can appear on a screen in seconds. Images can be searched, compared, replicated, and increasingly generated. Information is abundant.
Expertise is slower to come by. It is built from experience accumulated over time: knowing why the line of a chair belongs to a particular maker, why one marble responds differently beneath a sculptor’s hand, or why the provenance attached to a painting changes our understanding of it.
At LAPADA, that knowledge remains unusually visible. The Fair is organized by the UK’s largest association of professional art and antiques dealers, with more than 550 specialist members, and its vetting committee assesses every object for authenticity and quality.
For established collectors, that expertise offers confidence. For designers searching for pieces they cannot simply order from a catalogue, it offers access to extraordinary items alongside the people who understand them best. And for newer collectors, it creates the opportunity to ask questions, handle objects, and begin developing something that cannot be acquired overnight: an eye.
A Fair Gathering Momentum
LAPADA enters its 2026 edition following a particularly strong year.
Attendance at the 2025 Berkeley Square Fair increased by 10 percent over 2024, while organizers reported a growing concentration of museum-caliber objects and internationally important works. Among them were Sir Joshua Reynolds’ The Yellow Boy, Bill Brandt’s 1953 photograph Nude, Campden Hill, and a circa-1930 Cartier turquoise and diamond tiara once owned by Nancy, Viscountess Astor.
Significant sales followed. Winsor Birch sold Henri Martin’s Les Faucheurs (circa 1903) for approximately £500,000, and sculptor Paul Vanstone reportedly doubled his sales from the previous year.
The 2025 edition was also the first under the leadership of LAPADA CEO Elizabeth Shanks, who joined the organization in June 2025 following senior roles at the British Museum, Sotheby’s, and Barker Langham.
“2025 marked the beginning of a new five-year strategy focused on driving quality across the Fair and attracting influential buyers from new international markets,” Shanks said following last year’s event.
This year’s exhibitor list suggests that strategy is already taking hold. Dealers joining or returning to the Fair this year include renowned Mayfair furniture dealer Ronald Phillips, Godson & Coles with Andreas de Jong, Somlo, Sandra Cronan, Sladmore Gallery, Kolhammer-Preisinger Art, Mayfair Gallery, McBain & Byrne, and Hansord Antiques. They join established exhibitors including Butchoff Antiques, Lennox Cato Antiques, Wakelin & Linfield, Anthony Fell, and others spanning disciplines from furniture and sculpture to paintings, jewellery, silver, ceramics, and watches.
As Shanks recently told Antiques Trade Gazette, the aim is to bring “an exceptional selection of dealers with an equally exceptional audience.”
Excellence, Examined
That emphasis on quality extends beyond the vetting process. LAPADA’s 2026 Excellence Committee brings together ten figures from the worlds of museums, art, design, antiques, and collecting to recognize outstanding objects and presentations across the Fair. Members announced so far include Hartwig Fischer, Director of the Museum of World Cultures in Saudi Arabia; Jill Cook of the British Museum; former Sotheby’s sculpture specialist Alex Kader; and interior designer Natalia Miyar.
The awards look beyond beauty. The committee considers provenance, historical importance, craftsmanship, rarity, cultural significance, and presentation. Together, those criteria describe the deeper work of connoisseurship.
LAPADA has been exploring why that kind of knowledge matters in conversations with designers and specialists throughout the year.
In one recent conversation, interior designer James Mackie, formerly a specialist at Sotheby’s and Bonhams, pointed to a new generation of dealers and designers bringing fresh energy, expertise, and wider audiences to the field. He also called antiques “superb value for money.”
Interior designer Henriette von Stockhausen spoke to what antiques bring to a room: a sense of “soul, story, and permanence.” The accumulated evidence of another life gives an interior a depth that is difficult to reproduce.
Together, those ideas help explain the enduring appeal of a fair such as LAPADA. Expertise establishes what an object is. Taste determines what happens next.
Across Centuries, Under One Roof
The breadth of the Fair remains part of its pleasure. In the space of an afternoon, a visitor might move from an 18th-century English cabinet to Viennese design, contemporary sculpture in marble, Old Master paintings, silver, ceramics, natural history, vintage watches, and high jewelry.
Haute Jewels, which joined LAPADA’s exhibitor roster in 2025, returns this year. Furniture remains one of the Fair’s great strengths, with dealers such as Ronald Phillips and Butchoff Antiques among those bringing important pieces to Berkeley Square.
This is how antiques are meant to be seen. Great pieces rarely exist in isolation once they leave a gallery or fair. They enter houses and collections assembled across periods and disciplines. Seeing a Regency table a few steps from modern sculpture or contemporary jewelry invites visitors to judge objects by proportion, craftsmanship, color, and texture, and by instinct, as much as by date.
Designers often look at antiques this way, and collectors increasingly do too.
Looking and Learning
This year’s program makes the process of looking even more explicit. LAPADA will offer specialist tours devoted to British and European paintings, sculpture, and 18th- and 19th-century furniture, alongside broader Fair Highlights tours. The program brings specialist knowledge directly onto the Fair floor, folding education into the experience of buying.
It suits the setting. Fairs have long been a place where expertise changes hands, along with the objects. A label can give you a date, dimensions, and provenance. A dealer can tell you why the construction of a drawer is significant, what distinguishes one workshop from another, where a sculpture sits within an artist’s development, or what years of handling similar pieces have taught them to notice.
For anyone developing a collection, or simply learning how to look, those conversations may be among the most valuable things available in Berkeley Square.
The Pleasure of Knowing More
There will, of course, be remarkable objects at LAPADA this autumn. Some will carry extraordinary provenances. Some will be museum quality. Others may be quieter discoveries: a small work on paper, a piece of ceramic, a beautifully made box, or a chair whose proportions somehow make it impossible to walk past.
But the Fair’s greatest luxury may be what comes with them: access to knowledge.
At its best, connoisseurship is an invitation. It gives us a way in … a vocabulary for understanding what we see, a context for asking better questions, and the confidence to recognize the objects that deserve another look.
For six days this autumn, Berkeley Square will once again bring those objects, and the people who know them best, together.
And there are few better places to begin looking.
To purchase tickets or for more information visit: lapalondon.com.