Toronto-based Interior Design Studios for Intimate Settings
By: Michelle Strand
We spend the majority of our lives in the built world- the places and spaces made for us and designed for our use. We sit nestled between walls finding sunshine cascading across the floor, we stroll under soaring city skyscrapers that shape the streets with expansive shadows. This world where we reside, one of architecture and interior architecture, while concrete in form, is one that is deeply personal and perceptual.
The use of our senses - touch, sound, smell, look, and feel are those that physically connect us with space, and through that connection, open our ability to form meaning from these experiences.
Studio Munge - Park Hyatt Toronto
This is how we frame the essence of design, and in turn, architects, interior architects, designers, and installation artists are able to dictate our experience of space. Transforming spaces - ones of inanimate objects, into places - ones of personal reflection and meaning.
Mason Studio
In 2014, Mason Studio, an internationally recognized, Toronto-based interior design studio curated an art installation called “Cloudscape” for the Toronto Design Offsite Festival. This installation urged viewers to engage in an “ephemeral moment of quiet” - using a calming space. As visitors would approach the large textured cloudlike object, each cloud would start to glow and slowly fade as participants walked away. Cloudscape, through the use of light, sound, and texture transformed inactive elements into a profound human experience.
Yabu Pushelberg
On March 13th of 2018, in an interview with Dolce Magazine, George Yabu and Glenn Pushlberg, owners of Interior Design Studio, Yabu Pushelberg, and notably Ryerson Bachelor of Interior Design Graduates, discussed the meaning of design. “There are two parts to it,” Pushlberg says, “There are two sides of a brain creating rational things that make sense. But there are also things that fascinate us, things that have an inner beauty to them - a real beauty, not a facade of beauty.” Pushlberg is referencing the humanness of truly beautiful design. The type of design that forms lasting relationships with space - the ones that hit us so hard, that it touches the deepest, most intimate piece of our being. The spaces that we return to again and again, the places we miss, crave, and long to be in.
Choices of finishes, textures, or fabrics play an important role in design narrative. The impact of a sleek, cold marble interior, versus the warmth and smell of a light cedar filled room with a warm fireplace becomes increasingly prevalent in shaping the essence of space.
Studio Munge
At Studio Munge, a leader in evoking designs spanning from residential to globally-renowned commercial interiors, Principle, Alessandro Munge discusses his commitment to communicative design. He explains that in his design for the William Vale project, a luxury hotel in Brooklyn his careful choice of medium allowed him to represent the essence of what Williamsburg is. “Lattice fire escapes giving way to the more colonial tones and painted row houses that characterize regenerated Williamsburg.” Munge says he starts all of his projects with “why?” and only after finding the narrative of space, does he begin to design.
Glenhill Hotel and Residences