The lobby of the Ace Hotel Toronto is so impressive, its design so noteworthy, its creation so reflective of the surrounding city, we decided it deserved a full scholarly examination.
By Eric Mutrie
Architecture and design writer, Tablet contributor
Book Ace Hotel Toronto on Tablet Hotels.
Upon entering Ace Toronto, you’re met with an imposing sight. A series of soaring, steel-edged concrete arches hold the building aloft, like Atlas with the world on his shoulders. It’s as if you’re standing beneath an elevated expressway. Venture down to the subterranean restaurant and it’s like exploring the engine room of a hollowed-out factory. Head up to the mezzanine, where trees peek in through oversized windows, and you can almost convince yourself you’re in a cabin in the woods rather than the heart of a city.
Accompanying visitors on their journey between levels is Horizon Line, a plywood collage that stretches the full three-story height of the room. The artwork’s black, white, and gold triangles replicate the gentle waves of Lake Ontario. That body of water lies only a 20-minute walk south of the hotel. To the north, just beyond city limits, begins the quiet cottage country of the great Canadian wilderness. Toronto is a formidable metropolis, yet nature is never far away.
Shim-Sutcliffe Architects has a knack for reflecting this transition from industry to serenity. The local firm is renown for creating spaces that harness the spiritual power of Ontario’s landscape while also showcasing the monumentality of the built form. Their latest example is the Ace Hotel Toronto, which they designed alongside Ace’s in-house creative agency, Atelier Ace.
From the outside, the Ace ties into the city at large with a robust quilt of precast brick panels. The hotel may be a new build completed in 2022, but its facade weaves in local history by referencing the brick warehouses of the surrounding Garment District (as well as the prominent brick quarry that once defined Toronto’s Don Valley).
A wood-lined ribbon canopy covers the front doorway. Step through and you’ll discover that its curve is echoed by the row of concrete arches that span the space ahead, with their western columns extending right down into the sunken restaurant below. The eastern columns, for their part, terminate in a line of large “knuckles” that sit behind the bar, transferring the load of the hotel’s upper floors down to lower steel pedestals integrated into the building’s foundation.
The heft of these structural joints conveys the significant weight they’re supporting, calling to mind massive infrastructure projects such as Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway. Indeed, looking up at these lobby arches feels a lot like standing in the Bentway, the nearby urban park tucked beneath the highway’s overpass.
Yet amidst all these industrial references, there are just as many nods to nature. Apart from the indoor plants that adorn the lobby bar, there’s also the unconventional mezzanine configuration of this living room-like social area, which cantilevers out over the basement dining room below. Suspended from thin steel cables, the setup creates the feeling of being stationed right at the water’s edge, floating on some small, heavenly island. In this sense, the upstairs meeting rooms (which are perched at the third level of the triple-height atrium) function like treehouses — complete with more leafy plants.
Through it all, of course, Horizon Line — created by Howard Sutcliffe using plywood weathered on the beach at the architect’s own cottage.
This commitment to reflecting the Canadian landscape should come as no surprise, given Sutcliffe’s and wife Brigitte Shim’s portfolio. Shim-Sutcliffe has designed everything from an art gallery to a place of worship (the Wong Dai Sin Taoist temple in nearby Markham), and even a nursing home for a group of nuns.
They are perhaps best known for their spectacular private residences. The most famous of these, Integral House in Toronto’s tony Rosedale neighborhood, is a mansion that sweeps around the edge of a ravine. Many of the others are summer cottages built on bodies of water with names like Horse Lake and Hurricane Lake.
Meanwhile, the Ace goes to great lengths to spotlight its own nearby greenery. It’s no accident that the trees of St. Andrew’s Park feature so prominently in the lobby’s towering windows. Other elements heighten this feeling of being in a supersized forest retreat; while concrete can often feel cold, the version used here has been board-formed — poured into wooden molds that provide the texture and pattern of the grain — a feature that becomes especially magical come sunset as shadows dance across the surfaces.
Ultimately, all of this serves as a perfect introduction to the guest rooms above, which boast their own country cottage influence in the form of Douglas fir paneling and wide window benches that, in many cases, directly overlook the park. The rooms are a touch warmer and more organic than what’s downstairs, with vintage-inspired furniture, custom-made quilts, and the requisite Ace guitars and turntables.
The lobby isn’t bereft of similarly subtle touches. The bar’s copper backsplash, the perfectly broken-in black leather sofa, the kite-like pendant lights (a custom Shim-Sutcliffe design) — it all combines for an eclectic and inviting atmosphere that we won’t quite say is reason enough to make the Ace your #1 Toronto hotel of choice, but we also won’t say it isn’t.
Book Ace Hotel Toronto on Tablet Hotels.