Meet the young Toronto architects behind “the world’s best bar”

Toronto’s Bar Raval has quickly become one of the city’s most magical hideaways — sipping a cocktail at the sinuous mahogany bar is an experience not to be missed. Meet the three young designers who brought this architectural stunner to the corner of College and Palmerston.

The bar: mahogany and muscle-inspired

When chef Grant van Gameren approached Toronto architecture firm Partisans about designing his new bar, he told them he wanted something that would blow people away: in his words, “the world’s best bar.” And Partisans did just that. They took photos of Grant and his two partners and used their muscles and tattoos as inspiration for the bar’s interior. The bar’s signature sinuous mahogany was sculpted to look like muscle fibre, and the wood has a textured finish, instead of the usual smooth bar surface. “Grant wanted a reinterpretation of legacy, iconic European bar culture,” says Alexander Josephson, one of Partisan’s co-founders.

Josephson and Pooya Baktash started the firm in 2011, and recruited Jonathan Friedman to be their third partner in 2013. Between them, they worked out the details of the bar’s design. According to Josephson, van Gameren and his two partners are “pretty theatrical human beings,” so the idea was to create a 360-degree stage for them. The bar also features a bowl carved into the surface to hold lemons and limes, making it a “sculptural production line for cocktails, and a theatre.”

The interior: metal-lace lingerie

Internally, the structural steel used to hang wooden panels looks like spun lace — the fabric of lingerie — with holes to reveal the inside from outside and vice versa. Josephson describes the steel as “doing triple duty — they were creating framed views in, they were mystifying the environment and then they were actually thick enough that they became the structure the wooden panels hang on”. Another key detail about Bar Raval: it’s standing-room only. “We got rid of chairs and tables and created standing. It just forces people into social contexts and experiences,” Josephson explains. “People standing on the outside would be looking at people on the inside, and inevitably people will form relationships.”

An award-winning design trio

The Partisans are making waves all over the world. They won the Ontario Association of Architects’ Best Emerging Practice award, and an R+D Award from Architect Magazine, in 2015. Bar Raval, unsurprisingly, has been showcased in magazines and on websites from around the globe. “We have this kind of innocent, naive idea that architecture has this greater political relevance,” says Josephson. “Great architecture is a dream; it’s the sum total of what a society can aspire to.” The firm has also produced award-winning art installations, lighting, and even a graphic novel. As Josephson puts it, they make “amazing things for the most amazing people.”

Bar Raval is not their only famous architectural landmark. Images of the Grotto Sauna, built on an island in Georgian Bay, have gone viral, and that structure was nominated for the best small project award at Singapore’s World Architecture Festival. While it didn’t take home the prize, the firm had the chance to mingle with the more than 2,000 architects and designers at the event.

An island sauna carved out of cedar

The Grotto Sauna, an 800-square-foot structure made of charred cedar, with an interior made from northern white cedar, was inspired by the Precambrian rock out of which it grows. It came about when the owner contacted the team to build a new structure to replace his dilapidated old sauna. After spending two weeks on the island, and 3-D mapping the rocks, they came up with the idea of the sauna “growing out of the rock like a crystalline growth that contained this grotto.”

The design and build took several years, and more than 2,000 working hours, which included the writing of new software for the tools that would cut the white cedar. The sauna has since been featured in dozens of publications around the world, and was on the cover of a Korean architecture magazine. Josephson affectionately calls the Grotto Sauna the firm’s mascot.

Pushing boundaries in Toronto and beyond

Partisans’ other works include a “wellness pavilion” just outside Warsaw for a Polish millionaire, a Gusto 54-owned restaurant on Portland Street in Toronto and work on the retail and commercial space at Union Station. OAA president Toon Dreessen says the firm is pushing the boundaries of modern architecture, citing the Union Station work as proof “that architects think outside the normal realms and add value to what they do.”

The firm is dedicated to creative thinking and unexpected results, says Josephson. Partisans’ mantra? “Beauty emerges when design misbehaves.”