from today's Star....question..what is the Park Hyatt?
edit: they must be talking about renos at the Bloor/Avenue Rd. hotel....
Model of design: Trump's tricks
January 16, 2010
Momoko Price
Special to the Star
Certain occasions call for champagne. For Dan Menchions and Keith Rushbrook, co-founders of the Toronto-based interior design firm II By IV, that occasion came two years ago when the mother of all luxury contracts fell into their laps.
"A phone call came out of the blue," Rushbrook recalls. "A gentleman we've known for years and years. (He said) 'Keith, I think I have a project for you –Trump Towers.'"
Landing the contract to design all 57 floors of Toronto's Trump International Hotel and Tower is a reason to celebrate if ever there was one. So perhaps it was only fitting that the motif Menchions and Rushbrook eventually proposed for the tower was champagne and caviar.
"The caviar colouration would be the beautiful blacks," Menchions explains. "The champagne would be the sparkle and beautiful light tones of warm colour and ambers that carry throughout the entire property at every level."
For the lobby, Menchions and Rushbrook even designed a champagne-and-caviar bar, the kind one might find in high-circulation hubs such as London's Heathrow Airport. It's what Menchions calls "a power space," an intimate area that will hold only 30 to 40 people – in sharp contrast to the tower's skyscraping capacity.
Now, after a scant two years, II By IV has triumphed where three interior design firms had failed: It has conceived, created and finalized the decor for Canada's first Trump Tower, a mammoth project handed to them by developer Talon International.
By the time they got the contract, there were 3 1/2 years of catching up to do, three firms already cast aside and a real-estate sector on the brink of disaster.
But Rushbrook and Menchions' glowing recollections of the project barely hint at hardship at all. II By IV – "the last firm standing," jokes Rushbrook – apparently got it right, right from the start.
"The reality of (the project) now is the vision of what we originally designed," Rushbrook says. "That's very unlikely in a lot of long-term projects like this. They get watered down and down; things are taken out.
"You'll never know that with this project. If we were to show you the renderings from the first day, compared to what (it is now), you'd say, 'Oh my God – this is it. It looks exactly like it.' "
Channelling the tower's inner aura was actually the easy part – it took them only two weeks to put together a concept presentation for the lobby, sky lobby, standard suite and caviar bar – and just a second for Talon to say yes.
"We had a runway," Rushbrook recalls, "with renderings, groupings of materials and custom glass and custom carpets and furniture. Instantly, they said, 'You got it, you totally got it.'"
That was 18 months ago.
Since then, Rushbrook and Menchions have been tinkering and perfecting the design in an unassuming warehouse north of Toronto.
On the outside, there's nothing but parking lots, highways and faceless buildings.
But open a drab door, walk down a narrow hallway and you'll eventually emerge in the Trump Tower suites, exactly as they will be when the tower opens, down to the last detail.
"What we do in the hotel world is we actually have the client build an actual suite so we can test them," Rushbrook says.
"Test the patterns, the size, the space; the esthetic of the space. Are the washrooms working, are the vanities the proper size?"
In the past, Talon permitted only standard promotional shots of the model suites for the press.
Now, despite a tight race against four other luxury hotel brands (The Four Seasons, The Ritz Carlton, Shangri-La and
Park Hyatt), Talon is taking a risk and showing its hand.
"In the hotel world, you hold everything really close to your chest until you're ready," Rushbrook says. "You don't want anyone to copy you. You want to be the first one out there with it. But now I think it's close enough that no one can get in there."
From II By IV's perspective, Talon has nothing to hide.
"You don't need to do anything to the rooms. They're just so beautiful," Menchions says.
"The suites are fantastic, the residences – each one has been personally designed by all of us in the studio here: the details, the millwork details, types of kitchen cabinetry. It's move-in designed already."
"You can actually walk down the corridor to see if you like the look and feel of it," Rushbrook says. "(You can) put your key in, put your luggage down, hang up your coat, sit on the sofa."
After all, "when you're doing hundreds of these rooms, you want to make sure they're perfect."