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.

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.

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.