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Architects: Odami
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:Kurtis Chen
Text description provided by the architects. A stone's throw from Toronto's animated Yonge and Sheppard intersection, Hay Sushi is a neighborhood establishment known for elevated Japanese fare and relaxed dining. Odami had the opportunity to reimagine the restaurant's Spring Garden location in a nearby space with double its previous capacity. Our design seeks to translate the quiet confidence of the brand's menu — strongly composed dishes that are detail-oriented but not overly decorative — into an intriguing interior with warmth, comfort, and familiarity, a space that both honors and enhances the restaurant's existing posture in the community.
Located in the ground-floor podium of a 1990s residential tower, the new site was buried beneath years of DIY renovations, obscuring its inherent street presence and spatial qualities. With these layers stripped away, the 2,500-square-foot space returns to its essential industrial structure, defined by the heft and permanence of concrete and an abundance of natural light from restored floor-to-ceiling windows.
Our design embraces this raw built environment through a discipline of material layers that unearth opportunity and surprise. A warm palette of terracotta-colored tiles, sand-toned leather, and white oak furnishings imbues softness onto the heavy concrete structure. The resolute square geometry of the columns and beams dialogue with circular reveals subtly arched doorways, glowing sphere pendants, and the rounded cocktail bar. The opaque concrete is summoned to a conversation with transparency, translucency, and reflection through glass blocks, high-gloss epoxy flooring, and stainless steel millwork. Light filters through the waved glass, glides across the reflective floor, and bounces off the brushed metal, projecting spontaneous moments of texture and movement onto a steadfast, immovable backdrop.
Subtle architectural interventions create both flexibility and navigational ease in the expansive space. The raised dining room is delineated by exposed ceilings that establish a lofty ambiance, with a lowered canopy and dinner bar that breaks that scale toward the street. Cream-colored banquettes and floors recede into the walls, visually elevating two glass-block partitions gathered at the center of the room, a point of gravity for the main service area that also provides privacy from the busy corridor to the kitchen. Beyond the restaurant's high-traffic entryway and vestibule, the curved cocktail bar is wrapped in flecked marble and textured porcelain tiles, providing a point of arrival both generous and intimate.
The bar flows into a sushi prep area, a chef-activated space that exhibits the day's offerings. Grounded in simplicity and restraint, the project captures our ongoing interest in dichotomy — the critical act of bringing opposing ideas into the conversation — as well as our commitment to executing contextually sensitive design and thoughtful urban renewal at any scale. In this space, each architectural gesture is intentionally streamlined to produce an honest and poignant dialogue with what already exists. Sometimes, the quieter the interventions, the more they stand out.
