Toronto, Canada’s largest city, still carries scars from the brutal battles over planning and preservation in the 1960s and ’70s. Aesop’s third store in the city, designed by Toronto-based studio Odami, confronts this legacy and responds with symbolic usage of the city’s social and material history.

Located in Yorkville, a neighborhood known for its upscale retail and incessant parading of exotic cars, the recently completed skincare store nods to the long-lost countercultural forces that shaped its streets.

“Inspiration for the design came from the recently demolished 1969 York Square project by Diamond and Myers,” Michael Fohring, Odami’s cofounder, told AN Interior. “By adapting existing Victorian structures to a denser, differently programmed scheme, it showed us a good example of how Yorkville was going against the grain and mediating between scales and histories.”

The store layout replicates Yorkville’s block patterns of variously sized and textured parks, squares, and lanes at a smaller scale. Coated in burgundy paint, the interior’s edges thicken and swell to create smaller enclaves within: A tea station, fragrance library, and infusion chamber punctuate rhythms of hard and soft surfaces, evoking the dark, warm atmosphere of a Victorian parlor.

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