Design is Alive and Well at IDS in Toronto

Celebrating 25 years, Toronto’s Interior Design Show (IDS) assembled 220 exhibitors, including a strong Canadian contingent, on the 250,000-square-foot show floor at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre North Building last week.

Every big design expo has its concept space. Here, it was Night & Day, the Evolution of Hotel Design. The zone featured concept booths exploring the growing trickle-down influence of hospitality design on residential and office design. Previously, hotels were mostly a place to stay. Now they’re also a place to meet, drink, eat, work and be seen.

Night & Day’s bar, made with stone supplier Ciot’s Neolith material in partnership with interior design firm Yabu Pushelberg and Unique Store Fixtures. Photos by David Lasker Photography

Night & Day featured a splashy bar by interior designers Yabu Pushelberg and Unique Store Fixtures, made with Neolith materials from Toronto stone and marble supplier Ciot. The Night component was the bar, which indeed generated an afternoon buzz, and Day was portrayed by individual work surfaces cantilevering off the exterior side walls. As an inspiration to specifiers, the Neolith product was used in several ways, from wall cladding to custom millwork and furnishings.

As for the Night & Day Spa, imagine walking inside a shipping container that transforms into a shimmering amethyst quartz geode. That’s what a spin though the mesmerizing space felt like. It was created by Toronto custom-wallpaper supplier Rollout and interior design firm Coolab, and Vancouver-based Crystalworks Designs art gallery.

At Studio North, independent product designers exhibited their custom and one-off creations (including furniture and lighting, glass and ceramics, textiles and décor objects) within a gallery-like setting.

Among the finds at Studio North were the modernist, sculptural firewood holders at Archilog’s booth. Metal fabricator Gary Shaw, founder of the Elmira, Ontario-based firm, was tired of making stainless-steel and glass railings for homebuilders when he found a new market niche to fill. “There’s a big void,” he said. “If you go to buy a firewood holder, chances are you won’t find anything modern. It’s going to be your in traditional curlicue style.”

The Night & Day lobby, by Toronto’s SDI Design and Denizens of Design.

Nearby, at the booth of Toronto-based Object/Interface booth, the Yoke wall hook, Screen light, the aptly named Punch Cabinet Pull (they resemble brass knuckles) and more from designer-owner Ryan Taylor reposed on his prototype Scaffold shelving system. The shelves themselves, of Baltic-birch painted fire-engine red, were quite the eye-catcher.

The Prototype section addressed new ideas for the residential market such as the Knob chair by Toronto’s Alison Postma, a graduate of Sheridan College’s furniture design program. Was it just me or did that carpet of knobs really evoke the spike-covered interior of an iron-maiden torture cabinet?

Studio North also showcased work by design students. This year’s crop included arCHAIRtecture, an exhibit of imaginative modular flat-pack chair prototypes by the University of Iowa 3D Design Program.

The Spa at Night & Day by Toronto wallpaper maker Rollout and interior design firm Coolab with Vancouver-based Crystalworks Designs art gallery. At right, Rollout founder and CEO Jonathan Nodrick.

Now, onward to the show floor. Canucks call it a Muskoka chair; Americans call it an Adirondak chair. Regardless, its beloved iconic form continues to inspire updates such as the one designed by Partisan Architects co-founder Alex Josephson at the Wrmth [sic] booth. The North Bay, Ontario, firm offers patented, web-connected, heated stylish outdoor furniture for homeowners seeking year-round patio comfort.

At the Khayeri & European Flooring booth, Mehran Khayeri, eponymous founder and president of the Toronto firm, showed samples of his multi-layered flooring, wide and long plank flooring, and reclaimed and custom-colored flooring. The abstracted arcade framing the booth had a quietly brooding surrealism reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s pittura metafisica.

Toronto has long ranked as a marble mecca. Among the stone and porcelain firms at the show, Toronto-based Anatolia, recognized by Deloitte in 2008 as one of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies, has global operations in the design, manufacturing (including a 2-million-square-foot facility in Turkey), and distribution of sintered stone slabs, ceramic and porcelain tiles, natural stone products and mosaics.

Atriana Furniture took the palm for team spirit. White-clad staffers flanked the booth, which was demarcated with a white curtain and an ensemble of suspended gauzy grey forms evoking a Calder mobile. Foregrounding the display area was the Ottagano desk, notable for its fascinating, inverted-spider base and hexagonal leather desktop highlighted by solid-brass inlays.

At Night & Day’s Gym, designed by SDI Design and Northern Fitness, Matt Domegala, sales, at Toronto’s Northern Fitness, demonstrates why Nohrd’s HedgeHock, a butcher-block lookalike, makes for surprisingly supportive and comfortable casual seating. Each little cube is spring-loaded, enabling the surface to conform to one’s posterior.

At the booth of lighting and furniture maker Hollis+Morris, founder and President Mischa Couvrette explained that the firm’s name commemorates the Halifax street corner where he lived while studying for his bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences at Dalhousie University. American clients of the 10-year-old Toronto-based firm include Equinox (high-end gyms) and Starbucks. Debuts are planned for Milan’s Salone in April and Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign in June.

The best place at the show to record an interview was the booth of Winnipeg-based Hush Acoustics. The walls and ceiling lined with the firm’s panels were made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) from recycled plastic bottles and impressively attenuated the show floor’s echo and background noise. The panels come in 50 standard colors or any custom color and can be color-printed.

Toronto’s Ard Outdoor partnered with Spain’s Vondom. At their booth, lounge chairs made of rotational-molded resin riffed on Hans Wegner’s iconic Danish Modern 1949 Round chair (with the one-piece, curving arms and back). They played off against a facing rectilinear sectional sofa with a frame of industrial-looking aluminum expanded metal mesh — a humorously gussied-up version of a chain-link fence and hardly what one expects in upmarket patio furniture.

The Night & Day restaurant, by AD Projects x WAO with Kristen Parry.

Ralph Giannone, principal at Toronto’s Giannone Petricone Architects, presented one of the show’s most interesting seminars. His practice is remarkable not just for being prolific but for the range in size and genre of its projects, from small eateries to food courts, shopping centers and new skyscraper precincts. He spoke on the topic of Urban Feasts: Observations on Food and Public Realm in our Growing City. He said he believes that the most successful eateries and urban spaces, despite their disparate scale, share a common trait: a convivial, joyous chaos that is “baked in” to the design. His philosophy of always allowing for unplanned spontaneity imparts a trademark energy and artful raw, unfinished touch to his projects.

Among the other speakers, the eponymous owner of Studio Paolo Ferrari, with offices in Toronto and Milan, forecasted scenarios for hospitality design in his keynote address. His clients include LVMH, Four Seasons, 1 Hotels, Sanlorenzo Yachts, St. Regis and Raffles.

Entrance to Studio North.

Salone del Mobile, aka the Milan Furniture Fair, that blockbuster of international furniture expos, sent its top brass on a worldwide tour that included a stop at IDS. Speaking on the Main Stage, Salone President Maria Porro, revealed a tantalizing sneak-preview about what will be new and different at this April’s show.

“We used neuroscience to test the layout last year, with 100 visitors wearing sensors, and we discovered where people go and don’t go so much,” she said. “So we were able to redesign the layout to make exhibitors more memorable and save visitors’ time. At the Salone, there is something called fatiga museo’ (museum fatigue). Even at the Louvre, eventually, you’re running, you’re rushing and you don’t remember what you’re looking at. Each exhibitor has its own role to play in creating the most interesting presentation. But as far as the layout is concerned, we worked to increase the exhibitors’ memorability.”

David Lasker is president of David Lasker Communications and can be reached at david@davidlaskercommunications.