Located in uptown Toronto, the Bayview Village Shopping Centre is an icon from the 1960s, a time that saw smaller community malls open in growing residential neighbourhoods across the city — many of which are now gone. In our present, a growing desire for meaningful retail experiences in tangible, local environments inspires our transformation of Andrews, a celebrated Canadian womenswear retailer with a 5,500-square-foot location inside the mall.  

While offering a large selection typical of a department store, the brand’s goal is to provide a customer experience that feels closer to that of a boutique. In service of this balance, we devised an arrangement of low-to-the-ground volumes that instill a sense of choreography in the substantial space, a flow of slab-like forms that overlap and intersect to create clearly defined areas. The custom-built compositions are clad in microcement and soft, sand-toned leather, and punctuated by bold calacatta rosenoir marble — materials that evoke the quiet luxury of the brand. Playful and unexpected, these multipurpose elements cascade in and out of one another, coalescing as expansive display plinths, comfortable seating, and integrated storage. 

Anchoring these forms, five oversized light panels emerge from the walls around the perimeter. A brushed satin nickel bar drops from the ceiling in front of each, drawing the eye to illuminated clothing and accessories — a glance at what awaits in the section that incites drama and intrigue. Such moments capture, through design, the core offering of Andrews: providing an intuitive shopping experience defined by discovery and personal style. Nearby, secondary light panels wrapped in perforated stainless steel create a glowing, ambient home for shelved products, completing the scheme of subtle structures that cultivate a sense of mood and dimension in the box-shaped store.

To bolster the functionality of the space, upholstered panels clad the walls and integrate a modular display system that provides flexibility for changing stock. The ribbed fabric envelope empowers a soft, acoustically hushed atmosphere while the display system creates a graphic rhythm that, in tandem with ceiling-height mirrors, speckled porcelain tile, and metal components, create compelling visual pathways throughout the store. 

This rich, tone-on-tone palette flows into the window displays, reconstructed to create curated sightlines into the store, a glimpse to passersby of the experience within. A final light panel in the window solidifies the shop’s new architectural identity: an exciting composition of forms and materials that critically respond to the conditions of the space, emboldening a nuanced, human-scaled experience in a department-sized store.