Bentley Is Replacing Showroom Reception Desks With Bars
A hospitality-style layout with a materials atelier and a 3D configurator debuts at Jack Barclay in London and is slated for Bentley's 220-plus retailers, though the US rollout hasn't been dated.
Walk into a Bentley dealership built to the brand's new template and the first thing you'll reach is a bar, not a reception desk. Bentley unveiled the retail concept on September 24, and it is meant to spread across the automaker's entire network of more than 220 retailers in over 60 markets.
The first store to get it is Jack Barclay in London's Mayfair. Founded in 1927 and named after 1920s Bentley racer John Donald "Jack" Barclay, it is the oldest Bentley dealer in the world, which is why Crewe chose it for the debut. The announcement came a day after the reveal of the Torcal, Bentley's first all-electric model.
What changes for the customer
The biggest shift is the layout. Bentley is dropping the linear showroom, with its rows of cars along a glass wall, for something closer to a hotel lobby. A curved glass entrance leads to the bar, cars sit in gallery and lounge zones rather than in a lineup, and dedicated handover rooms use digital displays and staged lighting for the moment a customer collects a car or leaves for a test drive.
The center of every store is what Bentley calls the Atelier. It brings the leathers, veneers, finishes, and paint colors from the Crewe factory into the dealership as physical samples, paired with a 3D configurator that outputs to an LED wall. The idea is that a customer can spec a car by touch and see the result at full scale in the same room.
From the street, the new stores get a lit façade with a reworked version of Bentley's diamond quilting motif. Inside, the curves reference the winged badge, Bentley Green is a recurring accent, and lighting is treated as what the company describes as a "fourth material" that guides visitors through the space.
The concept is modular, so it can be scaled to different sites. A Mayfair corner store and a suburban US dealership won't look identical, but they are supposed to feel the same.
Why the dealership matters more now
Bentley delivered 10,131 cars in 2025, down 4.8 percent, and offset the volume decline with pricing, a richer mix of Speed and Mulliner derivatives, and growing bespoke demand; revenue slipped just 1 percent to €2.6 billion, according to the company's annual results. That is the business case for the Atelier: when personalization is carrying the margins, the room where the customer picks the hide matters.
The move also tracks Rolls-Royce, which has opened "Private Office" commissioning studios in Goodwood, Shanghai, Dubai, New York, and Seoul, bespoke design spaces that sit alongside dealerships rather than replacing them. Bentley's answer folds the same function into every store instead of a handful of invitation-only outposts.
For US buyers, the timing is the open question. The Americas are Bentley's largest region, with 63 retailers across the US, Canada, Mexico, and Latin America as of June 2025, but the company hasn't said which North American stores will convert first, when, or what the refit will cost its dealer partners. Richard Leopold, Bentley's regional director for EMEA, credited H.R. Owen, the dealer group that operates Jack Barclay, and its owner Berjaya Corporation with the investment behind the London rebuild, which suggests the bill sits with retailers rather than with Crewe.
Bentley says further global retailers will follow the London store. Until it names them, the bar is a London-only experience.
