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Loblaws Maple Leaf Gardens

Our brief was to create the "world’s best food store" in a downtown location that was once the iconic home of the beloved Toronto Maple Leafs. Our scope included all interior design, graphics, in store communications, packaging and uniforms.

Maple Leaf Gardens (MLG) is an urban location surrounded by multiple inner city units but with very few public places where the community can engage with each other. Whilst the intention was to create a model store that could be replicated elsewhere, the building itself was redolent with a history that informed our work in equal parts through its scale, massive brutality and social history. As such we decided that it was important to not just create a supermarket but rather a "Super" "Market", a social place not unlike a Market Town of old which was a community's hub; a place where people could meet, eat and fall in love.

Maple Leaf Garden was always a place of entertainment hosting major sporting, political and cultural events, from the beloved Maple Leaf hockey team and Muhamad Ali, to music such as the Beatles ad Frank Sinatra. We wanted to continue this. Multiple eating places surrounded by the theatre of food production deliver a place to experiment, and learn. We utilised the visual scale and brutality of the building combined with a very urban palette of materials to create theatre, energy and colour.

The ground floor at Maple Leaf Gardens now consists of 4000 sq m's of fresh food and the theatre of visible production facilities including a:

•  Full scratch baker •  14 chef open kitchen •  Pizzeria •  Grill •  Salad & Sushi bars •  Patisserie and confectionery

•  Cafè, canteen & cooking school •  Cheese specialist with the world’s tallest wall of cheese (6m tall)

In addition there is a 200 variety tea specialist, fishmonger selling only sustainable fish, aged beef butcher, deli, fruit and vegetable offer supporting organic and locally grown and a florist.

We chose to celebrate the buildings history through an integrated design approach, and achieved this by making these specifications a dynamic part of the overall design - exposing the “ghosts” of walls past, commissioning a 12m x 12m Maple Leaf sculpture of old stadium chairs, reusing stadium lighting, murals and much more. We used different signage treatments throughout. This includes signage of depressed in-situ concrete, blackened steel, copper plumbers pipe, neon, glass, wood, spot welded tin and paint on tile.

The resulting visual environment is very distinctive, differing from the bland generic of most North American supermarkets. Not only has our design delivered a new genre in food retailing, reinventing the vernacular for so many years defined by Wholefoods, but more importantly it has become a social hub, a place of and for the community, adding a richness to that part of the city whilst also honouring and celebrating the building’s past.

Above all else, MLG is still designed to make the food and the people making the food the heroes. No mean feat for a supermarket.

Presented by :  Landini Associates

Photography by : Trevor Mein

http://www.landiniassociates.com