Avenue Road love-in
Party boots
Last night’s party, an opening for Yabu and Pushelberg’s fabulous new digs for their high-end furnishings store, Avenue Road, made a splash on le tout Toronto’s design scene, and not just because it was raining cats and dogs.
The building, a former Consumers Gas warehouse with an adorably turn of the century red brick exterior was gutted entirely and re-imagined as a jewel-box of a showroom on three floors with a central open atrium. Enhancing the inside-a-jewel case effect are glassy etageres running vertically through the space like beautiful display ribbons. And of course, each piece, from the agate topped side tables and the splendid wooden footed bowls to the exquisite art on the walls is refect and precious.
Equally design savvy, however, was the crowd. Hoax Couture designers Jim Searle and Chris Tyrell were there, as were Azure magazine ed-in-chief Nelda Rodgers, Teatro Verde’s Shawn Gibson, Roseland’s Francoise Turner-Larcade, and Clayton Budd of 64th and Queen.
For a rainy night, it was odd how much colour was in the room.
Two Orange Men
In particular, Kontent publishing’s Geoffrey Dawe and design genius Arriz Hassam of 3rd Uncle design were feeling identically citrus.
As per usual, Arriz and I talked a book about his latest work and Stephen Harper and Islam and what we’ve each been up to. According to Arriz, his wife, Suzanne Dimma (ed of House and Home), complains that he turns in to “a radio” whenever we get together.
And of course, Arriz has always been up to rather exciting stuff. His latest effort, aparently was designing a temporary exhibit to showcase this planned Islamic art museum that none other than the Aga Khan is building–unbeknownst to anyone until the story just leaked–in Don Mills of all places, to house his extensive art collection. When it opens in 2013, it will be the first Islamic art museum in North America. According to Arriz, he had just three weeks to pull together this exhibit which should have taken months to put together, but everybody in the Aga Khan’s entourage was wildly impressed.
Similar story from my fave stylist to the stars Roslyn Griffith Hall, who was just bagged after she had just pulled together a fashion show the night before at the ROM for Paris fashion sensation Haider Ackermann–also his first show in North America. Apparently there were no clothes, it was sort of a disaster but there was tons of champagne –and Ackermann himself was awesome–said Roz, “he was rocking this whole Roma/Gypsy thing with a black fedora and these skinny white pants he’d obviously been wearing for like, six months, with three layered extra thin cotton t-shirts that all came to these sort of stretched out points in the corners and then this giant gray sort of blanket tossed around his neck as a scarf.” Which of course sounds all too fabulous.
It’s taken forever, but honestly how freaking cool– and world-class– is it getting here in Toronto?