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AlvinofDiaspar
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G&M: $3M reno for Rex Hotel (Queen St.)
From the Globe, by John Bentley Mays:
THE PERFECT HOUSE
Rebirth of the Rex through architectural magic
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
The distinctive swing and chic of Toronto's Queen Street West are nowhere more impressive than in the recently revamped hotels along the old avenue. First came the Drake: so cool it made your teeth chatter, so hip it hurt.
Then, last year, came the Gladstone. Restored to its original Romanesque elegance by architect Eberhard Zeidler, the Gladstone, like the Drake, is a former flophouse that now (in addition to renting rooms and pumping beer) serves the street and the city as a showcase of edgy contemporary music and art.
The latest Queen Street hotel to get an architectural makeover — a $3-million process that has begun, and that will continue for some time — is the Rex, just west of University Avenue.
Like the other two establishments recently overhauled, the Rex hails from the latter decades of the 19th century, when Toronto was still an industrial town, and hotels were haunts of the city's working men.
A hefty proletarian culture was nurtured in the hotels far into the 20th century — until that mid-century moment when the factories and warehouses along Queen ceased to provide jobs for men willing to work hard.
"They made good money, and they drank it," recalls Rex owner Bob Ross, whose father bought the place in 1950. "This was the wild west. In the old days, there was lots of laughter, and also fights. The street was rougher, vibrant in a different way. The blue-collar worker does not exist down here any more."
It was in the early 1980s, when boutiques and artists and cool kids were refashioning Queen Street into the scene it is today, that Mr. Ross decided to make live music a regular attraction at the Rex. So it was that the old hotel became one of Toronto's top jazz and blues clubs, a heavyweight title it retains to the present day.
Mr. Ross's idea in doing this transformation in the eighties was to accommodate the changing clientele of the area, not turf out old customers and tenants and start over again from nothing. Ditto the current renovation, which is all about keeping old-timers in their rooms — some have been there for many years — while gradually turning the Rex into a regular, up-to-date little hotel. (Mr. Ross is adding a reservation service, and is about to start taking credit cards — things unknown at the Rex until now.)
To design and supervise these changes, Mr. Ross turned to Toronto architect Paul Raff, whose master plan is a notably sensitive reply to his client's restrained ambitions. The first phase of the work, which is now in progress, involves the complete overhaul of 12 hotel rooms. Compact three-piece washrooms are being installed in each room — formerly, guests had to use a bath and toilet in the hall — along with all the usual modern hotel amenities.
The rooming-house look of the residential floors will be gone when this part of the work is done, and a new hotel will emerge: a place of tiny rooms (though hardly smaller than some I've rented in swanky New York inns) in close proximity to dance and music clubs, restaurants and museums and other civilized pleasures.
Future work will entail a thorough rethinking and redoing of the tap room. Mr. Raff's mandate is to keep as much as possible of what's funky and homey about the bar, while improving its currently awkward circulation. (I hope the architect retains the funny little skirt somebody put up around the top of a pillar, and all the photographs — evidence of the passage of time that has casually bedecked the Rex with a special history.)
At least at this stage of the game, Bob Ross and Paul Raff strike me as a perfect match for each other: a conservative client devoted to keeping his elderly building intact and determined not to lose his regulars; and a talented avant-garde architect who's as sharp about contemporary culture as anybody on Queen Street.
The result of their collaboration will almost certainly not be modish, like the Drake; nor would we want it to be. But neither will it be just another cleanup of a ramshackle Victorian edifice. Look for a rebirth of the Rex — a refiguring of its place on the cultural map of Toronto, an upward revision of its place on the city's scale of sociable delights.
Architectural design can work that kind of magic, even on a landmark that aims to keep on meaning what it always has meant to the life of Queen Street West.
AoD
From the Globe, by John Bentley Mays:
THE PERFECT HOUSE
Rebirth of the Rex through architectural magic
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
The distinctive swing and chic of Toronto's Queen Street West are nowhere more impressive than in the recently revamped hotels along the old avenue. First came the Drake: so cool it made your teeth chatter, so hip it hurt.
Then, last year, came the Gladstone. Restored to its original Romanesque elegance by architect Eberhard Zeidler, the Gladstone, like the Drake, is a former flophouse that now (in addition to renting rooms and pumping beer) serves the street and the city as a showcase of edgy contemporary music and art.
The latest Queen Street hotel to get an architectural makeover — a $3-million process that has begun, and that will continue for some time — is the Rex, just west of University Avenue.
Like the other two establishments recently overhauled, the Rex hails from the latter decades of the 19th century, when Toronto was still an industrial town, and hotels were haunts of the city's working men.
A hefty proletarian culture was nurtured in the hotels far into the 20th century — until that mid-century moment when the factories and warehouses along Queen ceased to provide jobs for men willing to work hard.
"They made good money, and they drank it," recalls Rex owner Bob Ross, whose father bought the place in 1950. "This was the wild west. In the old days, there was lots of laughter, and also fights. The street was rougher, vibrant in a different way. The blue-collar worker does not exist down here any more."
It was in the early 1980s, when boutiques and artists and cool kids were refashioning Queen Street into the scene it is today, that Mr. Ross decided to make live music a regular attraction at the Rex. So it was that the old hotel became one of Toronto's top jazz and blues clubs, a heavyweight title it retains to the present day.
Mr. Ross's idea in doing this transformation in the eighties was to accommodate the changing clientele of the area, not turf out old customers and tenants and start over again from nothing. Ditto the current renovation, which is all about keeping old-timers in their rooms — some have been there for many years — while gradually turning the Rex into a regular, up-to-date little hotel. (Mr. Ross is adding a reservation service, and is about to start taking credit cards — things unknown at the Rex until now.)
To design and supervise these changes, Mr. Ross turned to Toronto architect Paul Raff, whose master plan is a notably sensitive reply to his client's restrained ambitions. The first phase of the work, which is now in progress, involves the complete overhaul of 12 hotel rooms. Compact three-piece washrooms are being installed in each room — formerly, guests had to use a bath and toilet in the hall — along with all the usual modern hotel amenities.
The rooming-house look of the residential floors will be gone when this part of the work is done, and a new hotel will emerge: a place of tiny rooms (though hardly smaller than some I've rented in swanky New York inns) in close proximity to dance and music clubs, restaurants and museums and other civilized pleasures.
Future work will entail a thorough rethinking and redoing of the tap room. Mr. Raff's mandate is to keep as much as possible of what's funky and homey about the bar, while improving its currently awkward circulation. (I hope the architect retains the funny little skirt somebody put up around the top of a pillar, and all the photographs — evidence of the passage of time that has casually bedecked the Rex with a special history.)
At least at this stage of the game, Bob Ross and Paul Raff strike me as a perfect match for each other: a conservative client devoted to keeping his elderly building intact and determined not to lose his regulars; and a talented avant-garde architect who's as sharp about contemporary culture as anybody on Queen Street.
The result of their collaboration will almost certainly not be modish, like the Drake; nor would we want it to be. But neither will it be just another cleanup of a ramshackle Victorian edifice. Look for a rebirth of the Rex — a refiguring of its place on the cultural map of Toronto, an upward revision of its place on the city's scale of sociable delights.
Architectural design can work that kind of magic, even on a landmark that aims to keep on meaning what it always has meant to the life of Queen Street West.
AoD