Canadian Interiors Best of Canada 2012 by Annex Business Media

Fall 2012

BEST OF CANADA Winners of our 15th annual Design Awards

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Fall 2012

Official publication of the Interior Designers of Canada

CONTENTS 15th annual Best of Canada Design Awards Fall 2012

BEST OF CANADA Winners of our 15th annual Design Awards

On the cover Our two Best of Canada Projects of the Year (from top): CIGI Campus, designed by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects; and Siège social, Pfizer Canada Inc., designed by Menkès Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux Architectes

Thanks! We would like to thank Allsteel for the use of its incomparable Toronto Resource Centre, at which this year’s judging took place.

BEST OF CANADA PROJECTS OF THE YEAR CIGI Campus

Siège social, Pfizer Canada Inc.

BEST OF CANADA AWARD WINNERS Warner Bros. Games

Thales Rail Signalling Solutions Office

Vaughan City Hall

Hamilton Central Library and Farmers’ Market

Raymond-Lévesque Public Library

Cafe Belong

Kinton Ramen

House on the Bluffs

The Farm

Lawren Harris House

Cedarvale Ravine House

Telus G2 prototype store

Monde Presentation Centre

Sixty Colborne Presentation Centre

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15th annual Best of Canada Design Competition

Judgment day From left: Carolyn Moss (CM), Michal Maciej Bartosik (MMB), Merike Bauer (MB) and Robert Katelic (RK)

Welcome to the Best of Canada Award winners for 2012. The Canadian Interiors Best of Canada Design Competition is Canada’s only design competition to focus on interior design projects and products without regard to size, budget or location. We welcome submissions from interior designers, architects, decorators, crafts persons and design students. This year, we received a record-breaking 164 entries from across Canada, in nine categories: Office, Institutional, Hospitality, Residential, Retail, Exhibits, Presentation Centres, Landscape Design and Product Design. (Alas, we received not a single Student Design submission.) The projects and products were each judged anonymously and on their individual merit. Our judges, all Toronto-based, are Merike Bauer, principal of Reigo and Bauer; Robert Kastelic, principal of Atelier Kastelic Buffey; Carolyn Moss, principal of Moss Sund Architects; and architectural designer/artist Michal Maciej Bartosik. Three of them, we’re proud to say, graduated from the Canadian Interiors judges’ school. Which is to say, their outstanding work came to our attention when they submitted it to last year’s Best of Canada Design Competition and won. Merike Bauer’s Woodlawn house in Toronto; Kastelic’s Maison Glissade and Alpine chalet in Collingwood, Ont.; and Bartosik’s Dominion, a table-cum-lamp inspired by the ceiling of Mies van der Rohe’s TD Centre Banking Pavilion: they had the 2011 judges in raptures. We at the magazine were so impressed that we invited them to spend an afternoon on the other side of the judge’s desk last June. They and Ms. Moss offered some perceptive comments during the judging process that we’re delighted to share with you on the following pages. After careful consideration, frank discussion and lively debate, the judges chose 19 winners (with Exhibits not represented). These included not one but two Projects of the Year: CIGI Campus, in Waterloo, Ont., by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects; and Siège social, Pfizer Canada Inc., in Kirkland, Que., by Menkès Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux Architectes. Congratulations to all 19 winners.

— By David Lasker

8 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2011

Photo by David Lasker

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PROJECT OF THE YEAR

CIGI Campus, Waterloo, Ont. Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, Toronto

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is an independent think tank on international governance founded in 2001 by Jim Balsillie, then co-CEO of Research in Motion. It takes the form of an academic quadrangle wrapping a courtyard in the elegantly tailored Modernism we have come to expect from KPMB. However, as the photography suggests, its principal spaces have a fascinating, quietly brooding surrealism that summons Giorgio de Chirico’s Pittura metafisica. In the auditorium, tension arises from the clashing planes of contrasting materials. Richly figured brown acacia clads the floor and walls of the stage. The woodcovered realm butts directly and abruptly, without intervening moldings, against the stark volumes of the grey auditorium walls. These walls seemingly converge beyond the stage, like the sides of a ship’s hull that eventually meet in the bow. This dreamlike aspect continues in the lobby, with its big, unornamented flat planes of dark and light materials. Stringcourses wrap around the auditorium’s external wall, forcing the eye to read it as a multi-storey structure and thereby emphasizing the lobby’s massive scale. By comparison, the off-centre reception desk, tables and staircase seem small and insignificant. One imagines that visitors to this space speak in hushed, respectful tones, as if they were in a cathedral. On a larger, urban scale, this project helps knit together three Governor General’s Award–winning buildings near the site: the former Seagram Museum, designed by Barton Myers, where KPMB’s four founding partners worked before forming their own firm when Myers decamped to Los Angeles; the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, also by KPMB; and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, by Vancouver’s Patkau Architects. Design team: Shirley Blumberg, design partner; Steven Casey, project architect; Joy Charbonneau, Glenn MacMullin, George Bizios, Erik Jensen, Vivian Chin, Ramon Janer and Danielle Sucher

10 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

“This has such a compelling luxury of space. The dark, heavy lobby ceiling looks very serious”—RK “Austere and really well executed. I like the restraint in the desire to fill up the space with stuff, such as furniture and dividers. As an open space for students to convene in, this is atypical: it feels almost like a theatre foyer. It isn’t what one expects from a university common space”—MB “The interiors have an emotional, cinematic quality. The lobby with the benches reminds me of the Bertolucci film The Conformist”—MMB

Photography by Maris Mezulis

PROJECT OF THE YEAR

Siège social, Pfizer Canada Inc., Kirkland, Que. Menkes Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux Architects, Montreal

Talk about building the brand in subliminally subtle ways. Look closely at the new sunscreen wrapping the existing glass facade at Pfizer’s Canadian HQ, and you’ll see that the unusual texture was inspired by blister pack, the pre-formed plastic packaging used for small consumer goods like pharmaceuticals. Such a witty and elegant transformation of a plain-vanilla office building epitomizes the renovation of the Viagra maker’s 180,000-square-foot Quebec command post. On the exterior, new facades give a unified, hip, contemporary look to the complex of low-rise structures while improving the building envelope’s thermal performance. Inside, the reconfiguration focused on enlarging common spaces and providing more-democratic access to natural lighting for the 860 workstations. The walls of public spaces were decorated with a pattern of sliding planes that abstracts the facade’s blister-pack motif, notably a break area, where the black-and-white printed fabric seamlessly wraps the walls, ceiling and banquette seating. Design team: Anik Shooner, partner in charge; Isabelle Roy and Julie Morin, project leaders; Harvens Piou, Pierre Gervais, Kristi Ante, Marlène Bourque, Michel Tessier, Paolo Zasso, Vincent Lauzon, Shahinda Eldessouki and Marc-Antoine Primeau-Chartier “This has beautiful, fresh new ideas executed well and with levity. The idea of taking a graphic and using it in all kinds of different executions – as exterior element, upholstery, wall treatment, lighting feature and even the floor – is something exciting and different. The attention to the spaces is very rigorous. Visual intensity and minimalist plans clash interestingly. Some of it is so quiet and spare, and then you see this wild black-and-white intense pattern. You see the pattern going from floor to upholstery to ceiling and it stops you in your tracks”—MB “From its drab surroundings, this project pops. Optically, it’s not flat: there’s a lot of depth. Every view here is a vignette that tells a story, even if the motif of using a graphic in various scales and forms has been happening forever”—RK “Yes, but this project uses the graphic in a more sophisticated and tactile way, with colours defining spaces”—MB 12 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

Photography by Stephane Groleau

OFFICE

Warner Bros. Games, Montreal Services intégrés Lemay et associés, Montreal

With 7,000 jobs in the region, Montreal ranks among the top five video-game centres in the world, according to a June story in the Montreal Gazette. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, a major player, recently set up shop in “La belle province” and plans to grow to 500 people. The new, 65,000-square-foot studio currently employs 200. The interiors express the innovation and creativity associated with the industry. Upon exiting the elevator on the fifth floor, visitors feel the buzz, thanks to a series of vistas enlivened by pops of colour and unusual materials serving as focal points within a predominantly muted, neutral palette. Reinforcing the brand in an unusually dramatic fashion, names and logos of Warner Bros. games – such as Looney 14 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

Tunes, Harry Potter, Tom and Jerry, and Batman – stand in raised relief on blackenamel-coated MDF boards of varying thickness that clad the walls of the elevator core. The reception desk butts against one of these walls and presents a strongly contrasting surface of warm-toned, knotty, swirly grained B.C. fir plywood. Conduits and HVAC ducts snake every which way beneath the exposed, whitewashed ceiling. Employees toil, appropriately, at workstations whose custom design accommodates the industry’s heavy-duty equipment and cabling requirements, and benching configuration aids collaborative interaction. (Can one picture these folks working productively in cubicles or tall panel systems?) All in all, a suitably hip, congenial Corporateland for young Gen X gaming-programmer geeks.

Design team: André Cardinal, architect and partner in charge; Sandra Neill, design associate; designers Marco Brissette, François Descôteaux, Chantal Ladrie (project director), Isabelle Matte, Alexandra Rocheleau and Serge Tremblay “I like the amalgam of disparate materials and the unusual lighting fixtures”—MB “This project has that very aggressive,‘anything goes’ creativity you often see in Montreal interiors”—RK

Photograph by Claude-Simon Langlois

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Thales Rail Signalling Solutions Office, Toronto HOK, Toronto

All aboard! For Thales Rail Signalling Solutions, HOK transformed a standard office space into a railway journey. Thales designs, supplies and installs railway and subway signaling systems. Facing rapid growth, the company recently moved into a 218,000-square-foot space that reflects its brand in lively and imaginative ways. Signature materials evoking train travel appear in elevator lobbies and throughout the workspace. Textured walls with horizontal wood bands are reminiscent of stacked railway ties; giant stenciled red numbers on the polished concrete floors in the core and service areas conjure up memories of train platforms. Blurry photomurals depicting passing trains and Canadian landscapes infuse the project with a sense of movement and serve as wayfinding devices. Meeting rooms are branded and named after train and subway stops. Workstations along the perimeter have low panel heights to encourage team interaction and maximize natural daylight. Pretty good mileage for a construction budget of $41 per square foot. Design team: Deborah Sperry, design lead; Clarissa Lam, lead designer; Wendy Mok, designer and production support “I like the witty graphics about movement”—CM “That’s the industrial graphic, but there’s graffiti as well”—MMB “It represents the graffiti you’d see on the side of a train car”—MB “They show train-station names on the sliding glass doors in the open office”—CM

“You can imagine those walls being train windows”—MMB

16 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

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INSTITUTIONAL

Vaughan City Hall, Ont. Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, Toronto

Until 1981, the City of Vaughan was a rural township located at the northern edge of Toronto; today it is one of Canada’s fastest growing municipalities. While Vaughan’s motto, “The city above Toronto,” expresses a geographic truth, its rampant suburban sprawl recalls Gertrude Stein’s characterization of Oakland, California: “There is no there there.” So KPMB’s new Vaughan City Hall ranks as a timely act of urban place-making as well as a handsome piece of architecture. KPMB won the job in a competition whose requirements included submitting a master plan for weaving together the new city hall with a civic square, reference library, Vaughan Hydro, a water feature, Chamber of Commerce, reflecting pool/skating rink, public gardens and a naturalized park. The program is distributed among a series of low-rise structures organized to form a civic campus laid out according to a series of east-west bands – honouring the linear pattern of land cultivation and the larger framework of the concession grid originally characterizing the region. Offsetting the expanses of exposed concrete at the city hall are high-quality, durable local materials including ledge rock, an Ontario limestone, for public spaces; black Quebec granite for the council chamber and service counters; and white oak for meeting rooms, café, reception and workstations. The limited palette enhances the reading of the building as a unified whole. Design team: Bruce Kuwabara, design partner; Shirley Blumberg, partner-in-charge; Goran Milosevic, principal; Kevin Bridgman, associate/ project architect; Garth Zimmer, project architect; Walter Gaudet, Andrea Macaroun, Artur Kobylanski, George Bizios, Shane O’Neil, Carla Munoz, Bill Colaco, Richard Wong, Safdar Abidi, Ramon Janer, Dave Smythe, Lilly Liaukus, Jacki Chapel and Armine Tadevosyan “There are some beautiful moments here. That stairwell that looks like a fire exit is so gorgeous it alone would be enough to make the project deserve an award”—MB

18 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

Photography by Tom Arban

INSTITUTIONAL

Hamilton Central Library and Farmers’ Market, Ont. RDH Architects, Toronto David Premi Architects Inc., Hamilton

Prince Philip officially opened the Hamilton Central Library and Farmers’ Market in 1980. Through it has remained one of the city’s most important civic destinations, the years took their toll and it was in need of adaptive re-use. This project rejuvenates the existing building, by Anthony Butler, through the redesign and reorganization of both the library and market programs, a recladding of the first two stories, and the construction of an addition on the northwest corner of the site. The building site benefits from a long stretch of clear, urban street frontage along York Boulevard, a major artery traversing the downtown core. The update exploits this street frontage by creating a layered, permeable and activated facade that offers expansive views and openings into and out of the facilities, making them more accessible. Photograph by Tom Arban

A six-storey tower occupied by Hamilton’s main reference library accounts for most of the building’s bulk. The addition relocates the main entry of the library to York Boulevard from its previous position, where it was set back from the street edge. The library’s first level sits a half storey above street level, necessitating a barrierfree entrance, which occupies a new glazed entry vestibule within the addition. This vestibule runs the length of the library and connects to a market vestibule on the east side of the building. The new main floor of the library houses space for the children’s collection, a retail-style sampling of the adult collections housed above, staff areas, a multipurpose room and a new information commons with 60 computer stations. The farmer’s market spreads over three levels. The first level, at grade, was expanded to include a café and temporary marketstall area that opens directly onto the street

through large, 10-by-8-foot sliding glass doors. The second level is a partial mezzanine for stalls. The third level, a lower stall area underneath the ground level of the library, opens onto a large, light-filled atrium connecting the market to the street, the upper level market mezzanine and, in a visual sense, to the library above. The improved connection of the library and the market and the glowing transparency of the facade along a major downtown thoroughfare project the vitality of two of Hamilton’s important public institutions. Design team: RDH Architects: Tyler Sharp, design partner; Bob Goyeche, managing partner; Scott Waugh, Bunty Sambhi and Cara McGibbon. David Premi Architects: David Premi, managing partner; Sam Gargarello “It’s very modern in the way it is ephemeral and imbued with a presence without being massive. This project is filled with elegant resolutions”— RK

Best of Canada Fall 2012 CANADIAN INTERIORS 19

INSTITUTIONAL

Raymond-Lévesque Public Library, Longueuil, Que. Atelier TAG, Montreal Jodoin Lamarre Pratte et associés, Montreal

This competition-winning entry to design the main public library for Longueuil, Quebec’s third-largest city, had to address environmental and energy criteria as well as design issues. Sited between protected wetlands and a red-maple forest, the building acts as the gateway to the 50-hectacre Parc de la Cité in the recently annexed municipality of St. Hubert. A study of the prevailing winds spurred the freeform, sculptural shape of the roof, which suggests pinwheels and airfoils and makes for rooms with exciting, irregular ceilings. Spaces cluster around a central courtyard. This configuration allows glare-free, indirect natural light to penetrate deep into the interior. On the courtyard and outer facades, thick wood louvers and a filigree of thin wood blades wrap the fenestration, reducing the summertime air-conditioning load. On the lower level, jazzy retro pendant Pipe lamps, designed by Herzog & de Meuron for Artemide, enliven the flat ceiling and add a touch of whimsy to the traditionally stuffy atmosphere of a library. Design team: Atelier TAG (Manon Asselin Architecte): Manon Asselin, Katsuhiro Yamazaki, Thomas Balaban, Matt Balean and Laurie Damme-Gonneville. Jodoin Lamarre Pratte: Nicolas Ranger, Carlo Carbone, Gérard Lanthier, Guylaine Beaudoin, Serge Breton, Charles-André Gagnon and Maxime Gagnon “It’s like Rem Koolhaas and Will Alsop put together!”—MMB

20 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

Photography by Marc Cramer

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HOSPITALITY

Cafe Belong, Toronto 3rd Uncle Design, Toronto

Cafe Belong is located in the Evergreen Brick Works, a revitalized, century-old brick factory in Toronto’s Don Valley that was transformed into Canada’s first large-scale community environmental centre. The restaurant’s design aims to extend the destination’s following by introducing newcomers to Evergreen by playfully eliciting the site’s historical character and the locavore food vision of celebrity chef Brad Long. His high-quality, local, farm-to-table approach to dining was the driving force behind the restaurant and its motto: “Food is Fuel, Food is Medicine, Food is Love.” The spatial organization within the eatery facilitates a variety of dining options. The place hums throughout the day as a restaurant, casual café, bakery and take-out counter. Open-display fridges and vintage bakery racks showcase items that can be picked up for a picnic on the grounds or enjoyed at the communal table just inside the door. Specialty drinks, baked goods and lunch items can be ordered from the counter in front of the open bakery. Sit-down meals are served in the space beyond, set apart by an exposed, reclaimed wooden stud wall. The open kitchen and bar are completely exposed to the diners behind a brick half-wall that functions as a bar and pick-up counter. Multiple textures of reclaimed wood, vintage industrial finds, black steel and brick are layered into the open kitchen, bakery and seating areas. The 60-foot curlicue light fixture wrapping in and around the building’s trusses, inspired by the Cloud and Chair sculpture (1990) atop Barcelona’s Fundació Antoni Tàpies, makes a decorative pièce de résistance. Design team: John Tong, principal-in-charge; Eunice Lam and Reena Mistry “I love that chandelier”—CM “I like the way they use the vocabulary of the brick industrial vernacular”—MMB

22 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

Photograph by Tom Arban

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HOSPITALITY

Kinton Ramen, Toronto Dialogue 38, Toronto

Named after the Japanese word “kinton” for “golden pig,” the Kinton Ramen restaurant introduces Toronto’s downtown, Art Gallery of Ontario area to the casual dining tradition of ramen cuisine, based on wheat noodles in a fish- or meat-based broth. Baldwin Village, originally a quiet residential area, is now a commercial enclave bustling with intimate, familyowned restaurants. The site’s small, awkward footprint presented a challenge that Dialogue 38 met by making the long narrow walls the main design feature. Four-inch-square spruce blocks were sawn at an angle, then piled up in alter24 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

nately zigging and zagging layers to create a wall with plenty of depth and texture. This is further enhanced by the raking angle of the lighting. (Let’s hope the highly tactile wall was thoroughly sanded and sealed. Who can resist the urge to run their fingertips along it?) The broad expanse of unpainted wood serves as a visual metaphor for the pure, natural, unadulterated raw ingredients of the cuisine. Food is prepared in the open kitchen facing the long communal table. On the back of this central area, board ends poke out unevenly like so many half-finished mortise-and-tenon joints, harking back to Japanese Shinto temple

construction and enriching the play of shadow and light skimming the wall. In the washrooms, playful backlit pig silhouettes on the wall and mirror reinforce the brand. Design team: Bennett Lo and Sharlene Yuquico “This project takes the restraint that exists in Japanese design and makes something interesting out of it”— MMB “The designers have confined themselves to a disciplined, narrow palette”—MB

Photograph by Eric Lau

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RESIDENTIAL

House on the Bluffs, Toronto Taylor Smyth Architects, Toronto

Nestled amid towering oaks near the edge of an escarpment along the Scarborough Bluffs, this light-filled residence encompasses dramatic views of sea and sky. The compact, 2,300-square-foot layout connects every space with the double-height living room while treading lightly on a site subject to erosion and landslides. The existing house (it was the client’s childhood home) was torn down. However, existing foundations and basement walls were re-used, saving several weeks of construction time. Algonquin stone, left over from another job site, was salvaged for feature walls and exterior walkways. Further to eke out the modest budget, floor, wall and roof components were prefabricated, then shipped to and assembled on site. 26 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

Viewed from the street, the house is a simple stucco box distinguished by a screen of vertical channel glass. The translucent cladding provides privacy and admits glare-free natural light into the stairwell and master and guest bathrooms. At night, the elevation glows like an oversized lantern. The rear of the house dissolves into a two-storey wall of glass. This plane is penetrated by the fibre-reinforced cementclad volume of the master bedroom cantilevering out over the dining room below. The diminutive master bedroom accommodates a king-size bed and night tables. Its compact interior, with the view framed by the cedar-lined balcony, feels like a tree house. Sliding panels open up on one side to the double-height living room,

allaying potential claustrophobia. In a recurring theme of blurring the distinction between inside and outside, Ontario limestone wraps from the front wall to the recessed entrance, then reappears inside; the kitchen counter extends outside to become a barbecue counter; and an exterior planter reappears inside the living room as a planted slot in the floor. Design team: Michael Taylor, partner-in-charge; Rebecca Wei, project architect “This was a tough, low-budget project”—RK “The main element is the box that hovers within the house and cantilevers out. It acts as a ceiling to what looks like the kitchen. The wood cladding continues along the box through to the surface of the house — an interesting bridging of interior and exterior”—MMB

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RESIDENTIAL

The Farm, Northumberland County, Ont. Cindy Rendely Architexture, Toronto Looking for a contemporary take on country living, the client couple commissioned Cindy Rendely to design a house with a gabled roof for their 100-acre property with rolling cornfields. What says “rural” better than a gabled roof? Rendely embraced the challenge by exaggerating the gabled roofline’s pitch and specifying an aluminum rather than shingle roof. The metal, she felt, would make a better blend with the neutral tones of the exterior wood siding. The result is a monolithic form that sits calmly on the site. Rendely took cues for the house’s massing from the form of the existing barn that sits on the property’s edge. The new house’s long, low ground storey is interrupted by a two-storey volume containing the master suite above and a second bedroom and en suite below. The structure is a cube six meters long, wide and high (when measured to the outside peak at the highest ridge of the roof). Rendely believes, as did the ancient Greeks, that visual and spatial calmness derives from simple proportions and repeated forms. And so, she applied the bedroom cube’s dimensions to another new structure, the studio that went up at the other end of the site. The studio rotates 15 degrees from the house’s long axis to create an open courtyard space between the two buildings, with views directed toward Lake Ontario in the distance. A consistent materials palette limited to just one tile and one wood creates a harmonious backdrop for vintage furnishings and folk art. The grey porcelain tile echoes the region’s clay and rocky ground. The Douglas fir maintains consistent tones in its numerous and diverse applications: as interior window frames, doors, wall and ceiling finishes and custom builtin millwork, and as quarter- and rift-cut veneer and plywood sheathing. These plywood ceilings give the interiors a raw, barn-like feeling. Design team: Cindy Rendely, principal architect; Jennifer Scholes, project architect; Andrea Lacalamita, intern architect; Ryan Johnson, architectural technologist 28 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

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“This house derives its simplicity from the gable roof shape”— CM “I like the spirit and the sparseness. This house seems very unassuming and inviting at the same time”—RK

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RESIDENTIAL

Lawren Harris House, Toronto Drew Mandel Architects, Toronto

In 1931, Lawren Harris, the Canadian artist who started as a member of the Group of Seven and finished by painting gumdrop iceberg abstractions, built himself an Art Deco–inspired gem of a house in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood. The current project, a respectful update for a family of five, retains many original landmark features. The changes to the historic dwelling epitomize how the single-family residence has evolved as a building type since the ‘30s. In the new layout, a rear addition enlarges the ground floor to encompass a new kitchen, breakfast room, family room and rear entrance. The ceiling height in each space varies to define the free-flowing space as zones with individual character. The new cabana, pool and exterior kitchen are defined by a garden wall and covered colonnade. The former third-floor painting studio was remodelled into a new master suite. The expanded basement accommodates a new home theatre and wine cellar. The original public rooms (foyer, dining room and living room) were returned to a semblance of their former glory, but updated, with a mix of vintage and new fixtures and furnishings. The original wood flooring and stair treads were refinished and the vintage mullioned steel-frame windows repaired. Polished black terrazzo flooring and stairs tie together the new spaces and hark back to the original black-and-white colour scheme. A skylight marks the spot where old meets new. Now, the less-formal spaces play a more central and integrated role in the home drama. Design team: Drew Mandel, Jowenne Poon, Caroline Howes, Allison Gonsalves, and Rachel Tameirao “They’ve done quite a respectful job”—CM “This is a phenomenal, astounding transformation; it blows my mind. I saw the house when a high-school friend lived there and you almost can’t tell what’s been added. They have been bold with their furniture selection while keeping elements that are antique, like the bar in the 30 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

foyer. There’s an interesting amalgam of edgy furniture and tasteful contemporary interior finishes that meld with the originals. The area facing the pool was originally a secluded back service stair and unconnected with the main house”—MB Photography by Tom Arban

RESIDENTIAL

Cedarvale Ravine House, Toronto Drew Mandel Architects, Toronto

This 3,250-square-foot infill house for a family of four sits on a typical midtown Toronto residential neighbourhood streetscape. The rear of the property, however, is something else entirely: it transitions to a protected woodland landscape at the edge of the midtown Cedarvale Ravine. The building mass was pushed and pulled across the site to solve program requirements, maximize views and provide natural light. The circulation path progresses through intimate and expansive spaces and courtyards to the glassenclosed kitchen/family room, which defines the southern edge of the courtyard. On the second floor, a zinc-clad cantilevered superstructure hovers over the lap pool and frames views of the woods. Rooms on this upper storey have operable floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding interior wooden shutters, allowing each occupant to control the amount of sunlight, privacy, airflow and noise entering his or her room. A bridge connects to a green roof with a vegetable garden. The restrained materials palette and spare ornamentation help to focus attention on the dramatic site. Design team: Drew Mandel, Allison Gonsalves and Jowenne Poon “It’s nice to see the bold furniture selection with bright colours and a restrained materials palette on the interior. The staircase is beautifully detailed”—MB “That cantilever gets me. It’s a real structural feat to make ‘an interior in the exterior’ in this way“—MMB

Photography by Tom Arban

Best of Canada Fall 2012 CANADIAN INTERIORS 31

RETAIL

Telus G2 prototype store (Pickering, Ont., and Laval, Que.) Figure3, Toronto

To increase sales and market share, Telus wanted to create a new generation of retail stores that would redefine the customer experience and set the telecom company apart from the competition. To that end, it was deemed necessary to shift the consumer’s perception of the store as a place for needs-based transactions (such as contract renewals and complaints, and to report the breakage or loss of a cell phone) to a place to find inspiration and to explore the role technology plays in our lives. (Perhaps Telus management pondered the success of Apple’s stores.) Figure3 was hired to guide the prototype design and undertook consumer research that drove the decision to divide the store into four customer zones. The Delight zone, with the purple entry portal, aims to disarm customers and gain their attention with devices like the long-running critter campaigns identified with the Telus brand. In the Expose zone, customers can “kick the tires” to their hearts’ content by trying out live models powered by the latest technology. Products are organized by their operating platform, such as Android and Blackberry. Soft seating encourages customers to linger and explore the devices’ potential to suit their lifestyle and technology needs. LED screens highlight the various models’ features. Live Twitter feeds displayed on a glass wall encourage customers to interact further with the store. Salespersons get into the act in the Align zone, with its individual consultation pods for intimate customer-service interactions, such as diagnostics and plan set-up. Finally, the Support Zone has a full range of peripheral accessories that allow consumers to customize their devices to suite their individual needs. Free phonecharging lockers build loyalty and increased visits to the store, helping to establish a Telus user community. Since the rollout of the redesigned stores in the fall of 2011, performance has been exceptional, with outlets recording 32 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

the highest-grossing monthly sales within Telus’s retail network. Customer traffic and transaction levels have increased substantially. Among non-customers walking in, Telus has enjoyed an explosive 60-per-cent in-store sales conversion rate from its key competitors.

Design team: Chrisopher Wright, Andrew Gallici, Bradley Marks, Angela Stinson, Carly Durrant and Jessica Swift “One of the successes in this project is the rigorous use of a limited colour palette that takes its cue from the company’s branding. The effect is bold and cohesive, tying together surface finishes, furniture and lighting with the company’s logo and marketing”—MB

Photography by Steve Tsai

PRESENTATION CENTRE

Monde Presentation Centre, Toronto Cecconi Simone, Toronto

A presentation centre is where sales associates educate prospective purchasers on the developer’s story, the project team, the surrounding neighbourhood and the demographics of those likely to live there. It also displays floor plans, scale models and renderings, along with sample boards showing options for floor, wall and surfacing finishes. For developer Great Gulf’s Monde Condominiums, a mixed-use community envisioned for Toronto’s East Bayfront, Cecconi Simone devised a presentation centre that would convey the project’s design, by celebrated architect Moshe Safdie. The space also had to convince potential buyers to make a leap of faith and buy into the notion that the neighbourhood, now a seedy former industrial zone, will blossom into a thriving waterfront community as promised. The 4,200-square-foot Monde Centre generates a refreshing, idyllic, one-with34 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

nature ambience through the use of extended sight lines, highlighted vistas, layered surface planes and textures, and, most conspicuously, plantings of artificial green walls and manmade forests behind glass. Simulated vegetation, with lighting positioned to enliven its texture, leads the eye through the centre. In the reception area, a documentary-style video plays across multiple flush-mounted monitors; it profiles members of the development team and describes the project’s (soon-tobe) desirable locale. In the main gallery, tempered-glass panels coated with touch foil show interactive displays of the suites and amenities. These slender objects substitute for real model suites and preserve the openness of the verdant main space. In this “high-touch” environment, all the materials were selected on the basis of their texture and are presented in their natural state. Green walls and barn doors,

for instance, were assembled from untreated, weathered-pine barn board salvaged from barns throughout Ontario. A metaphorical rippling stream of crushed glass defines the ground plane. The ceiling and its constellations of LED pin lights evoke starry outdoor skies. Stone benches and cantilevered ledges, cast in béton brut concrete (retaining the marks of the rough wood formwork) offer a perch to contemplate all this faux natural beauty. Design team: Anna Simone, principal; Jude Thompson, associate; Pauline Ayoub, team leader; Firas Yousif, intermediate designer; Elvis Chan and Ed Remigio, senior CAD technicians “As presentation centres go, this one’s unique. It does the opposite of what’s happening in condos now, with interminably clean exteriors and interiors. This one is more like walking into a winery”—MMB “I like all the spatial depth here”—RK

Photography by Ben Rahn / A-Frame

14 carrots ÂŠ 2012 Benjamin Moore & Co. Benjamin Moore and the triangle M symbol are registered trademarks licensed to Benjamin Moore & Co.

PRESENTATION CENTRE

Sixty Colborne Presentation Centre, Toronto Johnson Chou, Toronto

The client asked for, and got, a simple, economical white glass box of a condominium sales presentation centre on a prime, highly visible location, at King and Church streets in downtown Toronto. Setbacks and easements limited the footprint to 3,300 square feet. Johnson Chou and his associates chose a minimalist aesthetic and predominantly monochrome colour palette for its upscale demographic associations and to contrast the serene interior from the hustle-bustle of its surroundings. Yet the interior remains rooted to the cityscape, too. The reception desk frames a view of the landmark St. James’ Cathedral across the street. The visitor proceeds past the lounge and a cylindrical acid-etched glass partition into a narrow corridor where wall panels tell the developer’s story. From there the corridor expands to where 36 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

a suspended panel exhibits suite plans and sample finishes. A model of the finished building rises against the backdrop of the cathedral. The space then opens up into a gathering area that includes a glowing touch-screen monitor wall and closing tables, again with the cathedral in view. From this open space one enters the prototypical 600-squarefoot suite that includes living-dining, library, bedroom and bathing areas. As night falls, illumination is maintained in the model suite to attract the attention of passersby. Elsewhere, the interior lights automatically turn off and projectors display a video of the proposed development onto the glass walls. Within a few months of the sales centre’s opening, the project was judged to be a success – and not just going by the numbers. The developer felt that the

centre’s Modernist aesthetic would help the brand be regarded as more exclusive and desirable. Design team: Johnson Chou, Silke Stadtmueller, Anne Ehlers and Shant Krichelian “It’s rare to see a display suite done at such a high level”—MMB “There are very beautiful vignettes here”— MB

Photograph by Ben Rahn / A-Frame

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LANDSCAPE DESIGN

UBC Faculty of Arts – Buchanan Courtyard Pavilion, Vancouver Public: Architecture + Communication, Vancouver Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg Landscape Architecture, Vancouver

The challenge of the Buchanan Courtyards Renew project was threefold: to revitalize two UBC arts-faculty courtyards that had fallen into disuse and disrepair; to remain sensitive to the classic ‘50s International Style of the surrounding building complex, designed by Zoltan Kiss on behalf of Thompson, Berwick, Pratt & Partners; and to fully realize, at long last, the original intent of the Courtyards as a destination and public gathering space on campus. In one of the courtyards, Public created a pavilion to serve as an outdoor stage for performances, with input from prime consultant Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg Landscape Architecture. The proscenium arch takes an iconic sculptural form whose canted and folded concrete planes eye-teasingly evoke the Möbius strips, 38 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

endlessly ascending and descending Penrose staircases, and self-referential strange loops of M.C. Escher. The pavilion’s proportions derive from those of the original buildings. Perhaps this is why the old and new play off each other so effectively. The vintage surroundings, which appeared so boldly “ultramodern” when built and had latterly come to seem tired and banal, now seem revivified. The pavilion’s 50-foot span is built around a seven-inch-thick concrete slab, folded to fulfill aesthetic, structural and mechanical requirements. The complex mid-span geometry and near-seamless, form-tie-free finish were made possible with the use of 3-D modelling and the use of CNC machine tools to fabricate the pavilion formwork. The pavilion’s folding

planes recur in the forms of the courtyard’s new benches and canopies. The new structure emerges from a shallow reflecting pool embellished with quotations. Each of the Faculty’s 25 departments supplied a quote about the arts that was typeset in radiating rings at the bottom of the pool. The concept was so well received it became the foundation for the new Arts Faculty visual identity. Design team: Susan Mavor, Chris Phillips, Andrew Robertson, Brian Wakelin, John Wall with Ross Dixon, Chris Forrest, Scot Geib, Kirsten Jones, Matthew Thomson and David Zeibin. ”This is a ‘yes’”—RK “What can we say? It’s very cool”—CM

Photograph by Bob Matheson

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PRODUCT DESIGN

Objex Cindy Rendely Architexture, Toronto

Toronto-based Seven Continents manufactures store fixtures, such as mannequins, furniture, lighting fixtures and display systems for fashion retailers. The firm acted as client, fabricator and value engineer when it commissioned Cindy Rendely, a goldsmith and product designer as well as architect, to create Objex, a line of tall, slender plinths for displaying jewelry. The system had to be fully functional as a display backdrop and as a sculptural, stand-alone installation that would be a featured art piece within a site-specific pop-up shop. The machine-like precision of the minimalist columns contrasts against the more artisanal-looking, hand-carved cubes of wood and stone on top of the columns, creating an interesting yet quiet backdrop that highlights the jewelry pieces. The cubes are carved in various ways to receive recessed trays, troughs or totem-like rods for displaying bracelets, necklaces and rings. These inserts are made of bronze that was chemically treated to develop a matte black patina. Columnar components are made of extruded aluminum sections with a white powdercoated finish, have a five-inchsquare footprint and vary in height. The maximum height was deemed to be the level at which jewelry could be viewed from a distance, and from close up, without forcing the customer to bend over in the customary manner and crane his or her neck. The display cubes’ width and length match the column footprint and are made of stone or hand-carved wood from non-endangered Indonesian forests. The wood is cut in various directions to bring out the swirling grain pattern. Stone materials include hand-carved lava stone and laser-cut limestone, marble and granite. Design team: Cindy Rendeley and Stacie Vos “The transition from the scale of the podium to the displayed object is handled well”—MMB “These objects have a primeval quality”— RK

40 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

Photograph by Tom Arban

PRODUCT DESIGN

Unity Keilhauer, Toronto

The roomy, comfortable Unity plays two roles in Keilhauer’s seating line: executive chair and boardroom chair. The addition of a headrest and upholstered arm caps transforms the mid-back boardroom chair (with urethane caps) into a stylish high-back executive desk chair. Both versions come with polished aluminum arms and either black or polished aluminum five-star bases. The chair has Greenguard indoor air-quality certification and contains post-consumer recycled content, which contributes to LEED points. Adjustments include seat height, tilt tension, tilt lock and backrest height. In addition, Unity incorporates the company’s trademarked Free Shoulders backrest, which supports the natural curve of the lumbar and thoracic vertebrae; and Pelvic Balance Point technology, which ensures that men and women get proper support (women tend to sit more upright and slightly forward, on top of their ischial tuberosities or “sit-bones,” while men tend to sit on the back of those bones). Design team: In-house “This is quite a gorgeous executive chair. Its lines are subtle, both in section and elevation. It modernizes the pomp associated with being the head honcho”—MMB

42 CANADIAN INTERIORS Best of Canada Fall 2012

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