A salotto is a living room. That's the point.
Il Salotto is that room for Scotland's architecture and design community — 300 sqm on the fourth floor of the Merchant Exchange, in the heart of Glasgow's Merchant City. Somewhere to see products properly, hear someone speak without a sales pitch, eat well, and leave with a conversation you didn't expect to have.
In eighteenth-century Italy, the salotto was where people gathered to talk — writers, architects, politicians, anyone with an idea worth arguing about. Often it was a woman's drawing room: Clara Maffei in Milan, Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi in Venice. Ideas crossed disciplines and social classes there in a way they couldn't anywhere else.
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That's the room we've tried to build on Bell Street. A host, a long table, and the people who shape how Scotland gets designed, in one place, talking.
Why Il Salotto?
The setting was elegant. The conversation wasn't always polite. Good things came out of it.
20 Bell Street is a six-storey red sandstone warehouse designed by Campbell, Reid and Wingate between 1914 and 1921 — neo-Egyptian detailing, channelled pilasters, the kind of building Glasgow used to make when it was making things. We're on the fourth floor. Two lifts, so nothing comes up the stairs, and Q-Park a minute away.
20 Bell Street
Broad recessed panels below the windows add depth, while the fourth-floor windows are framed with supportive mullions. The fifth floor presents bold blocks between windows, and the attic level has pedimented dormers on a tiled mansard roof. A cast-iron parapet with anthemion finials crowns this early 20th-century architectural gem.
The Merchant City in Glasgow is a vibrant, historic district known for its architectural beauty and creative spirit. Originally a bustling trade area in the 18th century, it became home to merchants who shaped Glasgow's economic rise.
Sara Seravalli
La Padrona di Casa
Sara spent twenty years in showrooms in Milan, Paris, Pimlico Road and Clerkenwell before founding #DesignPopUp in 2014 — travelling events that have brought brands and specifiers together across the UK and Ireland ever since. Il Salotto, opened in March 2025, is where #DesignPopUp lives permanently.
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She's Italian, she cooks, she judges the Herald Property Awards, and she will introduce you to someone before you've taken your coat off.
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We're not a library of samples. There are bigger showrooms with more brands and you should visit them. What we have is one brand per category, a host who knows every practice in the room, and a table. Small on purpose.
