For a corporate law firm with a fun streak, Giannone Associates architects crafted a surprising interior with bold strokes in brass, oak and hot pink felt.
By Elizabeth Pagliacolo
Photography by Tom Arban
Just before completing the interior for Toronto law firm Wildeboer Dellelce, architects Ralph Giannone and Pina Petricone were called into an emergency meeting. “There was a tense group of lawyers waiting for us,” Giannone recalls. “Some partners hadn’t bought into the design.” The new headquarters, which takes up the top three floors of a nondescript grey 1960s tower in the city’s financial district, was bound to raise some eyebrows: the design is bold, colourful and irreverent. Giannone Associates Architects made the most of a standard square floor plate, with an expansive reception area and boardrooms on the eighth floor, and light-filled workspaces on the ninth and 10th. More important, the architects honoured the boutique law firm’s “work hard, play hard” spirit, turning the traditional law office palette on its head – and treating the 2,300-square-metre plan to “oak and brass like you’ve never seen it.”
The eighth-floor reception area instantly telegraphs this subverted scheme. Exploded oak panels animate the front desk, and a blue sea of overlapping felt patches lines the wall behind it. In the adjacent waiting area, leather-upholstered lounge seating is set against a marble rectangle inlaid in the drywall. And just beyond, what appears to be a slender brass column turns out to be a floor-to-ceiling expanse of brass that sheathes the outside of four boardrooms. This lustrous wall gently curves from the front desk to a pool table – which sits like an object of worship outside the staff lounge – and then swooshes right, leading to the largest boardroom at the end of this promenade.
The gleaming brass lends the interior an open feel, even as the material, with its connotation of heaviness, responds to clients’ psychological need for a hermetically sealed space in which to finalize their deals. The architects manipulated the volume of the four meeting rooms by inserting drop ceilings and wall sections – painted teal, mustard yellow and fuchsia – to create more dynamic envelopes within the larger ones of the spaces. To frame a view of City Hall and the concrete jungle outside, they cut a horizontal opening in one of the staff lounge walls. “It provides glimpses for the staff,” says Petricone. “They work long hours, but are always immersed in the city.”
The raw urban spirit in Giannone Associates’ portfolio may well have been the deciding factor for Perry Dellelce, the law partner who spearheaded the design process and chose Giannone Associates over three other architecture and design firms. “Two had done some of the traditional law offices in the city, one had designed for marketing and Internet companies, and one did ad agencies and bars. We picked the one that did ad agencies and bars.”
