The dark burgundy paint at Aesop is inspired by the banquettes at The Riverboat, a legendary Yorkville coffee house.John Alunan/Supplied
Park the DeLorean at the intersection of Yorkville Avenue and Yonge Street. Check the Flux Capacitor and set the time controls to 1966. After achieving 141.6 kilometres an hour (88 mph), you’re going to see some serious stuff.
First, as far as the eye can see, it’ll be Victorian Bay-and-Gable houses: all skinny, some with gingerbread trim intact, and all with their front lawns replaced by pavement. Every house – converted to retail shops and coffee houses – sports a stoop, and most have a low, iron fence dividing the property. Some have narrow staircases that lead down to basement rooms such as the one at famed The Riverboat coffee house at No. 134 Yorkville. Signage is bohemian, hand-painted and charming. But what you’ll really notice are the throngs and throngs of teenagers and twentysomethings, all sitting, leaning, strumming, strutting – and most with those messy Beatle haircuts.
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Husband-and-wife architects Arancha González Bernardo and Michael Fohring didn’t have access to Back to the Future-style time machine. But the co-founders of Odami, an architecture and design studio, did pour themselves into all sorts of research into the old Yorkville when designing interiors for Aesop, a high-end skin-care and fragrance shop on Cumberland Street. They focused on its unique architecture, such as those Bay-and-Gables (now found only on Hazelton Avenue, Scollard and Berryman streets) and nook-and-cranny buildings, including the internationally recognized York Square by Diamond and Myers (opened 1968, now demolished).
“Every store is very different,” begins Mr. Fohring, who grew up in Ayr, Ont. and worked at an architecture firm in Austria. “It’s driven by the context.”
“It’s tricky in the sense that it’s an area that has skyscrapers, but then still has this scale that feels domestic,” adds Ms. Bernardo, who was born in Asturias, Spain, and started Odami with her husband in 2018. “You used to have the little streets, the little patios, the smaller houses.”
The light-filled design of Amadeus Patisserie in Yorkville is designed to put customers at ease.Supplied
And the retail spaces were cozy, dark, and perhaps even tucked into semisecret laneways, or into purpose-built but still very exclusive-feeling courtyards like the one at York Square.
Open the door to Aesop and, for a moment, that vibe is alive again, except the patchouli odour has been replaced by much more refined smells. Odami has created a world made from hundreds of discarded wooden spindles, too short for today’s building code, but tall enough to create a Victorian wainscotting-fantasyland in dark burgundy paint, which references the colour of the beloved banquettes at The Riverboat. Deep, niche-like recesses in walls, hidden lighting and small, foyer-type seating add to the old school warmth, as does the large, shared sink that dominates the space.
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“We started a deep dive of Victorian houses,” Ms. Bernardo says with a laugh. “So this idea of porcelain sinks … we tried to enamel it but it was too expensive and too big to be enamelled, so in the end it was Corian.” And Aesop was so impressed by Odami’s vision, they asked them to design a store in Los Angeles.
Much closer to home, Amadeus Patisserie at 1235 Bay St. (at Cumberland) shows that Odami isn’t afraid of bright spaces. Here, they’ve embraced it, as the gobs of natural light that pour in from floor-to-ceiling windows are expertly guided over creamy-drywall hill and valley as they make their way to interesting convergence points and ultimately stop at what matters: a rack filled with golden, crusty, round loaves and tall, tapered baguettes clustered together like arrows in a quiver.
“The idea here [was] comfort and being able to stay and relax and feel at ease,” says Mr. Fohring.
“It doesn’t feel imposing to enter,” adds Ms. Bernardo. “It feels like a neighbourhood, everyday spot.” And in Yorkville, that’s a good thing, since some shops don’t feel that way.
The shelves may be backed with gold, but the design of Living Beauty is meant to evoke an old-time apothecary.Supplied
A built-in couch with bookshelves provides space to quiet the mind.Supplied
Three kilometres away on Dupont Street, Odami has created an everyday, welcoming spot for Living Beauty.
Some of the cosmetics on its shelves are so exclusive, they “don’t do advertising,” says Ms. Bernardo. While it’s true that the shelves lined with Biologique Recherche are backed in gold (laminate), the rest of Mariam White’s store feels like a small-town apothecary where folks can linger and ask questions at a wraparound bar that recalls a drugstore soda fountain. Arch-topped “product bays” evoke old bookcases, upholstered seating brings deep window reading nooks to mind, and a 1970s chrome light fixture and terracotta-coloured floor tiles cause this writer to think of Toronto’s earliest enclosed shopping malls. But, to give the floor a 21st-century spin, the long tiles have been arranged in a sweeping semicircle that draws the eye to entrance to the treatment rooms. Back there, filtered light from reeded glass and cool, watercoloured walls immediately quiet the mind while the built-in couch with bookshelves (and a whimsical ‘lips’ coffee table) relax the body.
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With (almost) everything available online, “there’s this desire for connection,” offers Ms. Bernardo. “Almost a bit like the way stores used to work when we were kids; [the employees] are experts, they’re professionals, they tell you want you need.”
“It’s really rooted in service and interaction,” finishes Mr. Fohring. “Taking [apothecary] as a typology and unpacking its principles and abstracting it … so it doesn’t feel so explicitly as an apothecary or Parisian or Italian, but something that lends these nostalgic reference points and becomes something new.”
New, yes, but Odami’s interiors add much needed old school warmth and humanity to today’s cold retail world. And, best of all, the DeLorean can stay in the driveway.