A new boutique art fair has opened inside one of London's most storied buildings. The inaugural London Invitational, which runs until 18 October, is staging presentations by 12 galleries across a floor of rooms at the Chancery Rosewood hotel in Mayfair, the former United States embassy on Grosvenor Square.

The fair was founded by James Cope, a British-born dealer based in Dallas, who launched the Dallas Invitational in 2023 as a boutique hotel event running alongside the Dallas Art Fair. After its second edition at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek, Cope was approached by the Rosewood Hotel Group to create a London version. The venue is a fitting match: the mid-century Modern building, designed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen and now owned by Qatari Diar, the real-estate arm of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, opened as a luxury hotel last year.

At Thursday's opening, visitors moved through the hotel's third floor, where presentations from mostly US-based dealers were propped on windowsills, positioned over sinks and suspended in front of mirrors to avoid damaging the walls. The exceptions among the exhibitors are the London galleries Charles Asprey and Vardaxoglou. All 12 participants have previously shown at the Dallas edition, and most of the works on view are priced in dollars. Fair partner Jessica Nowitzki described the format as a kind of open-house viewing, while one New York collector admitted to having already spent heavily at Frieze and Sotheby's before arriving.

The launch adds another boutique alternative to Frieze Week, which this year has seen a proliferation of small, dealer-led satellite fairs. Cope is betting that intimacy and a tight edit of galleries will appeal to collectors fatigued by the scale of the main fair circuit.