After nearly a decade in Leslieville, Lady Marmalade’s owners commissioned Omar Gandhi Architect (OGA), in collaboration with SvN Architects + Planners, to transform a boarded-up East Chinatown row house into the new home of their popular brunch destination. To say this was a tall order is an understatement.
“It was tough to see how this could become a bright, airy brunch spot,” says Omar Gandhi, principal of OGA, about the site. “It was a reductive, or subtractive, method of sculpting, where we really just took things away.”
And so out went large sections of floor plate. In went rear windows and skylights, then every wall, beam and ceiling was clad in blond-hued Baltic birch, pushing the aesthetic limits of what’s possible within Toronto’s characteristically narrow architectural footprint.
From the street,…
