While Frieze London and Frieze Masters dominate Regent's Park, a cluster of smaller fairs is offering collectors an alternative to the traditional fair model — and business models that look nothing like the big tents. The London Invitational, founded by Dallas dealer James Cope, launched today at The Chancery Rosewood, the former US embassy building on Grosvenor Square designed by Eero Saarinen and now owned by Qatari Diar.

Cope created the Dallas Invitational in 2023 as a boutique hotel fair running alongside the Dallas Art Fair, and is transplanting the formula: 12 exhibitors, each taking over an individual guest room on a single hotel floor. The roster includes New York's Franklin Parrasch Gallery and Lomex, Los Angeles's Bel Ami and London's Vardaxoglou. "There's a general fatigue around these massive conglomerate art fairs like Frieze and Art Basel, where there's 300 galleries and there's tens of thousands of people," Cope says, pitching instead "something that's intimate, high quality and considered."

A bolder experiment is Fair Play Art Fair, a new venture by Ryan Stanier — who founded The Other Art Fair before selling it in 2016 — at One Marylebone, an events space in a former church designed by John Soane. Fair Play gives artists without gallery representation a direct route to collectors: around 70 artists have been selected, a majority of them women, with prices from £200 to tens of thousands of pounds. Crucially, there is no upfront stand fee; instead the fair takes a 42% commission on sales, removing the initial financial barrier while asking artists to weigh the back-end cost.

Also scaling up is Minor Attractions, now in its fourth edition, which has moved from The Mandrake to the larger The Newman hotel. This year 75-plus galleries take 16 rooms on the hotel's first floor, with London galleries paired with visiting exhibitors to create collaborative hangs. It has also launched Major Futures, a non-profit arm funding independent presentations during Frieze week, responding to UK cultural funding cuts. With a possible New York edition of the Invitational already being discussed, the boutique model is proving it can travel.