A luxury project Kendall Roy would approve: Toronto design duo with international cachet brings it home with 210 Bloor

What took them so long?

Twenty-five years after Monsoon — a restaurant in Toronto that blasted them into the international stratosphere when it nabbed them a coveted James Beard award for design; one that glamour buffs will remember well — the fellas behind Yabu Pushelberg are touting a residential project.

Their first one here. Finalement.

“It just felt right,” Glenn Pushelberg, one of the founders of the powerhouse interiors firm, started to say when I got an exclusive first look this week at the place where a building dubbed 210 Bloor will rise. Near the Royal Ontario Museum, which it looks out at, as well as Philosopher’s Walk, the Tribute Communities development will include only 40 units over 29 floors — one Pushelberg went on to call “a treasure project.”

Heck, the presentation centre itself for 210 Bloor is so inordinately spiffy and so quietly luxurious that it looked like Kendall Roy was already crashing here. (Note: the units are going from $7 million all the way to a dizzying $40 million.)

Speaking more on what attracted them to this project — perched on a lot where the Remenyi House of Music sat for decades and where generations of Torontonians plucked their pianos and/or got their song sheets — Pushelberg explained: “As a designer it has a very clear design problem to solve, which you have to be adept at to solve, in that it is a very deep building, deceptively deep. Wider than you perceptively think it is. To plan it well and not be another shoebox in the city … it requires some finesse.”

At which point, George Yabu — his partner in life and in light fixtures — piped up to talk about the promised “skin of the building,” c/o CORE Architects, which will boast a tantalizing “tessellated tower of glass” (a.k.a. a covering of a surface using one or more geometric shapes, with no overlaps or gaps … thank you Google!).

For all the designer nerd-talk, it is clear that 210 Bloor represents a triumphant milestone in Toronto for both dudes (who already together have an Order of Canada). True, their fingerprints are already on a flurry of landmarks here — they famously did the interiors for the Princess of Wales Theatre and the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville — but their noisiest feats have increasingly come on the global front, as typified by their inclusion on the Elle Decor A-list (a designer list they climb year after year). From New York City to Kuwait City: the cities they have circled. From Bergdorf Goodman to Tiffany to La Samaritaine in Paris: the retail collabs on their CV.

A mere, partial list of the hotels they have designed tells the story: the Park Hyatt in Bangkok, the Las Alcobas in Mexico City, the Fairmont Century Plaza in L.A., the Edition in Miami Beach.

Residences-wise, the other big one they have on the go now, I am told, are the Aman Residences in Tokyo. Back in 2018, in a profile done about them, Departures magazine reported that Yabu Pushelberg had “41 current projects in 15 countries, 80 products in various stages of design and development, and a staff of 125 spread between Toronto and New York City.”

Strolling down memory lane, we stopped to talk a little about Monsoon, the restaurant on Simcoe Street that kind of became their calling card in 1998. Although they had been toiling for a while then, it catapulted them to a whole new level when they won their James Beard for it, collecting their award at the ceremony in Manhattan from none other than Martha Stewart, as Yabu recalls now. It was what caught the attention of the Starwood Group — the hotel giants — and led to high-profile gigs stateside.

The Asian-fusion temple had lighting that seemed novel at the time — a soft fluidity, Yabu calls it — plus panels alluding to Shoji screens and lacquer accents everywhere. It was so chic that when the movie “American Psycho” was shot in Toronto around that time, Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman takes a date to Monsoon (doubling as a set for a restaurant scene). Check: the history of Toronto fabulosity!

Long-time followers of Yabu Pushelberg lore probably already know that they first met as students at Ryerson — just platonic! — and then crossed paths again later on the street, where they shared their mutual frustrations about finding studio space. One thing led to another, which led to sharing office space and, well, eventually, more.

What street was it?

“It was in front of the Summerhill liquor store,” Yabu said with a hefty smile.

Their relationship is one in which they have been ping-ponging about design ever since: a long, undulating conversation about shape and dimension, end tables and wall mouldings. Whenever and wherever (the duo have four homes, in Toronto, Miami, New York and Amagansett), it never ends. When they go out for dinner, Yabu, whose father was a boat maker, and Pushelberg, whose grandmother was a weaver, cannot stop talking about it all, they both say.

“We don’t get invited to peoples dinner parties anymore,” Yabu quips — primarily because people feel their furnishings and their table settings are going to be diagnosed.

Lighting, in particular, remains an obsession and is something they have had umpteen conversations about when it comes to the 210 Bloor project. “We started as retail designers, don’t forget,” Yabu reminds (the earliest Club Monaco stores, for instance). “That is all about lighting: how to seduce the customer to take that sneaker off the shelf or go for that bauble.”

Their view on the Toronto residence reflects the gestation of their thinking about what they do now. “At this point in our careers,” Pushelberg says, “it’s not about being bigger. It is easy to do the obvious luxury. This is a luxury based on scale and proportion, and the flow of spaces. Using quieter materials. There is no need to be overly expressive.”

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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