Cozey Flagship Experience Centre, Ontario commercial project, Toronto photos, Canadian interior architecture
Cozey Flagship Experience Centre in Toronto, Ontario
30 October 2024
Design: LAAB architecture inc.
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Photos by Riley Snelling
Cozey Flagship Experience Centre, Canada
Cozey is a digital native, Montreal-based furniture start-up created in 2020 during the pandemic. In 2023, the disruptive retailer wanted to create their very first physical store and experience centre, one that could faithfully translate their ethos, embody their “unique selling proposal”, be strongly differentiated from legacy competitors, and help customers interact directly with their products. The selected location was a vacant streetside space in Queen West Village, Toronto, Canada.
Brandscaping Cozey
Cozey called upon LAAB architecture to imagine the prototypical flagship, starting with defining the optimal user experience journey and then leveraging the strategic design firm’s singular brandscaping process to refine the store narrative and fix design fundamentals.
No stranger to branded environments, LAAB creative lead Michel Lauzon – who’s body of work includes award-winning designs for leading brands such as Adidas (ref: Enter the Stadium Flagships), Cirque du Soleil and Ubisoft – directed the strategic design flow, integrating concurrent input from ad agency Cossette, who crafted the brand identity and developed the graphic design components for their digital and physical realms.
Beyond the interior architecture, LAAB’s creative team also conceived the space’s integrated furniture, from display platforms to shelving and design centre materials’ cubicles, as well as the visual merchandising strategy for the furniture collections.
Physical retail gets ‘Cozey’
The result is a next generation store totally merging the digital and physical channels, featuring no onsite storage, no cash registers, and instore display products acting as physical avatars as the purchasing is exclusively online. The design approach is both UX and product focused, starting with a stunning window showcase, evoking a giant fabric weave to draw pedestrians inside the space.
The elongated retail space then moves patrons towards the design centre situated at the end, funneling them through successive “rings”, inspired by a photographer studio’s cyclorama. Beyond enhancing the featured products in each ring, the curved and edge-light backdrops seamlessly flow from floor to ceiling, creating an immersive shape that subliminally evokes generic house room dimensions and proportions without resorting to artificial set pieces like other leading furniture retailers.
The result is a deceptively simple, yet disruptive retail space that seems to straddle the digital and the physical, one that deftly subverts conventional retail paradigms while ensuring the primacy of product over brand, a core Cozey tenet.
The essence of comfort at home
Building on start-up’s values of innovation and simplicity, LAAB responded to the challenge of “What is Cozy?,” postulated at the onset, by crafting a wholly integrated brand and product physical experience – a cross of streetside store, brand experience space, and design centre – creating both a highly functional and intimate space: one that embodies the feeling of ultimate comfort at home.
Cozey Flagship Experience Centre in Toronto, Canada – Property Information
Architect: LAAB architecture inc. – https://www.laabarchitecture.com/work
Location: 1026 Queen Street West, Queen West Village, Toronto, Canada
Client: Cozey Inc.
Master Architect/Lead Designer
LAAB architecture inc.
Strategic Design
UX & Experience design (LAAB)
Brandscaping (LAAB)
Local Architect: CHASE architecture inc.
Project Manager: Gino Mauri, LAAB
Design team
Lead designer : Michel Lauzon, Creative Director LAAB
Gino Mauri, LAAB Project Director
Daphné Beaudry, Senior Technical Designer LAAB
Maeva Lonni, LAAB Design Strategist
Frédéric Gagliolo, Conceptual Designer LAAB
Maxwell Sterry, Conceptual Designer LAAB
Collaborators
Brand strategy and identity, service design: Cossette
Window showcase industrial design: Studio Officiel
Engineers
Structure: Strudet inc.
Mechanical/electrical: Hava Engineering Ltd
Audio-Visual and Automation: ZAAB consulting
Permitting & Approvals: de Haan Design Company inc.
Main Suppliers
General Contractor: Downs McGovern inc
Lighting: Lumigroup
Lighting Designer: LAAB architecture inc.
Budget: 1.4M$ CDN
Project Completion Date: May 2024
Photographer: Riley Snelling
About LAAB architecture
Founded in 2020 by creative leader Michel Lauzon, LAAB is an award-winning architecture firm advocating a rethink of urban and interior architecture services, to deliver original, high-impact real estate solutions. Its innovative STRATEGIC DESIGN toolkit combines strategic consulting, architectural design, and creative thinking, applied to built environments. This unique service offering leverages an agile problem-solving design process, perfected to tame the most wicked real estate challenges and unleash every project’s potential for greatness.
Based in Montreal, with an international outlook, LAAB crafts bespoke spaces that accelerate business outcomes for a wide range of clientele: developers, brands, organizations, and owners who create, deliver, and manage built environments of all types and scales. LAAB clients share a common desire to deliver innovative projects, curate captivating consumer experiences, and build spaces that celebrate their brand.
Photographer: Riley Snelling
Cozey Flagship Experience Centre, Toronto, Canada images / information received 291024 from v2com newswire
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada, North America
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