Interview

Q&A with London architect Alex Cochrane

Few architectural projects have the kind of emotional pull that U.K. architect Alex Cochrane felt on his first Canadian design, a revamp of the iconic Holts Café in Toronto’s flagship store. It was a sort of homecoming for Alex. Years ago, he flew to Canada to ask Alannah Weston to marry him — an experience he admits was pretty nerve-wracking. “It wasn’t until Alannah’s mother, Hilary, organized a brunch at Holts Café later that I could relax,” he says with a smile.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Alex grew up in County Wicklow, Ireland, and studied at the Chelsea College of Arts and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He started his career at Eldridge Smerin and dePaor before launching Alex Cochrane Architects in 2009. Since then, he has refurbished Marcel Breuer’s de Bijenkorf building in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and revamped Selfridges’ men’s designer floor and eyewear department.

But Alex has drawn the most attention for a temporary silence room he created at Selfridges in London (the Westons own Holt Renfrew and Selfridges stores in England). Shoppers could escape to the empty space — outfitted with a wraparound banquette topped with felt — to meditate or practise yoga. It may sound counterintuitive for a retailer to lure customers away from the merch, but this move reflects Alex’s insight into the modern consumer. “We should be just as conscious of how a person feels in a space as how the space appears,” says Alex. “We wanted to make the café evolve from day to evening, and shake it up with a bit of colour.” Plush banquettes are upholstered in ultramarine, with swathes of the hue repeated on the private dining room walls. Electric blue features prominently in Alex’s commercial projects, but his residential designs — including his and Alannah’s Victorian home in Earl’s Court, London — are an ode to minimalism, with white walls and hits of warm wood. We talked to

Alex in the café about the retail design process and how decorating affects mindset.

The newly redesigned Holts Café in Toronto.

Alex Cochrane’s firm created a silence room for quiet meditation in London department store Selfridges.