Prescription charges: Hirst admirers pay £11m for contents of Pharmacy

With its aspirin-shaped bar stools and medicine cabinets, it was fleetingly the most fashionable restaurant in London.

With its aspirin-shaped bar stools and medicine cabinets, it was fleetingly the most fashionable restaurant in London.

Last night, Pharmacy, the now-defunct venture of the artist Damien Hirst, was again hailed a success - when its entire contents were sold for millions at auction.

From its Martini glasses to its egg cups, an exhaustive selection of 166 items designed by Hirst to fill the Notting Hill restaurant fetched £11.1m. They were only expected to fetch £3m.

The appeal was obvious from the length of the queue that snaked outside Sotheby's in central London.

A world record was set with the sale of one of the artist's well-known medicine cabinets, Phillacid (PFS) , created in 1997-98, which was bought by a private collector for £1.2m. A pair of Martini glasses, with a reserve price of £50 to £70, sold for £4,800.

A set of eight Jasper Morrison egg cups, again expected to fetch little more than £60, sold for £1,920.

Two "butterfly" paintings by Hirst defied estimates of £120,000 to £150,000 to sell for £354,000 each.

A set of six chairs proved equally popular, selling for £364,000, effortlessly exceeding some 200 times the reserve price.

Hirst set up the restaurant along with three others in 1998, using the establishment as a permanent showpiece of his artwork, designing everything from the ashtrays to the urinals.

While he went on to sell the restaurant to the Hartford Group, he bought back the fixtures and fittings following its closure last September.

As well as crockery, glassware, furniture and stained-glass windows, last night's sale also included 10 butterfly paintings, 11 wall-mounted medicine cabinets and a unique molecular model sculpture.

"The prices achieved are simply fabulous - quite unreal. People were queueing around the block to get in and the sale was delayed for 10 minutes because buyers were still registering," said a spokeswoman for Sotheby's.