Local Act
Inside a tucked-away studio in Liberty Village, designer Paolo Ferrari has the world at his feet
At the foot of Liberty Village, a towering wooden door stands mysteriously among the crumbling, graffitied walls of an alleyway. Once, it led to a secret sex club overlooking the Gardiner – and before that, a foundry and warehouse for The Canada Metal Company.
Those pasts are a far cry from the elegant sights that now live within. Today, the door opens onto the transformative studio of Paolo Ferrari. Although only three years into his own practice, the interior and furniture designer can hardly be labelled a novice. He reigned as design director of the risk-taking firm Yabu Pushelberg for six years before breaking out on his own, citing a desire to harness the unique possibilities available to a globally minded designer in a city like Toronto.
True to plan, his inaugural projects have taken him around the world. For a subterranean speakeasy with fingerprint access in Dubai, Ferrari devised an interior straight out of a dystopian film about the future’s elite – complete with an admirably classical aesthetic and a bathroom that uses mirrors and bronze-tinted glass to stretch into infinity.
Ferrari references Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as one inspiration for this otherworldly interior, noting that he also loves Fellini and Godard. “These filmmakers created iconic moments that you can’t really inhabit, but you can experience. I’m saying, let’s inhabit them now, in our own way.”
Outfitting the space is seating from Ferrari’s bespoke furniture series, Editions. His third collection – made by hand in Toronto – was released in 2019 to international fanfare, and features a hybrid mohair sofa–chair that can seat up to 10 on its extra-low arms and backrest, as well as an off-balance lounger with an extraordinarily sculptural profile.
Perhaps that’s not what you’d expect from a Toronto-born OCAD U alum who came up in the brickand-beam resurgence of the early aughts. “There are certain parts of the world where people have a heavy [design] history, like an Italian designer born in Milan, or a French designer born in Paris,” Ferrari says. “That baggage is pretty heavy. In Canada, there’s a cultural ambiguity – there’s kind of no expectations.”
If that’s true, Canada’s undogmatic order clearly works for the imaginative designer. In the next three years, he’ll participate in some of the country’s most important developments. In the Ottawa area, he’s reworked the sales centre of Canada’s first One Planet Community into Zibi House, an immersive site filled with experience rooms that celebrate the Indigenous roots and biodiversity of the area. In the coming year, he’ll reimagine the lobbies of seven forgotten office towers across downtown Toronto, including a modernist gem by Peter Dickinson. Perhaps most auspiciously, he’s been named the interior design consultant on the 81-storey Frank Gehry towers set to rise at King and Duncan streets in 2022.
The logistics won’t be a problem; Ferrari’s portfolio boasts large-scale hotel interiors, as well as two astounding residences in Muskoka. But despite all his experience, the designer says he still likes to ask the “stupid question” – that which often accompanies the innocence of pure imagination. Can a single chair seat an entire dinner party? Can a tiny washroom feel as large as the universe?
“In that naïveté there might be another answer no one even wants to consider,” says the designer. “To me, that’s where invention is born.” STUDIOPAOLOFERRARI.COM