First Look: The Ace Hotel Toronto’s New Rooftop Bar Evangeline

When the long-awaited Ace Lodge Toronto at last opened this summer time, it turned an prompt cultural feeling (not to mention the cover star of our September/Oct concern). Created by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, the constructing is an spectacular equilibrium of brawny concrete and woodsy detailing, with its cantilevered foyer bar and sunken dining space equally running to feel concurrently grand and intimate. 

But the preferred downtown desired destination continue to has yet another trick up its sleeve — all the way up on the 14th floor, to be specific. On Friday, the Ace Hotel Toronto debuted its rooftop bar, Evangeline. A further regional institution in the producing, it supplies the ending touch to a landmark architectural enterprise that can now be admired in its entirety.

Named just after the initial element-duration film to be produced in Canada, Evangeline seems destined to engage in an specifically distinguished part on the TIFF social calendar. That reported, Torontonians will be pleased to hear it also strategies to host open up-to-everyone DJ nights and dance functions all calendar year long, complementing a menu of snacks and smaller dishes by Patrick Kriss (of Michelin star-winning Alo fame).

As with the Ace Hotel Toronto’s other hospitality areas, the 80-seat lounge feels as cosmopolitan as it does calming — portion downtown penthouse and element rural cabin. Doing the job with Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, the Ace Lodge Group’s in-home Atelier Ace structure team made a colour palette that conjures a wander in the woods on a crisp slide day, pairing muddy eco-friendly hues with decide on hits of coppery pink.

Constructing on the hotel’s precast brick façade — itself a nod to just one of Toronto’s signature developing materials, highlighted throughout a lot of the city’s vernacular architecture — Evangeline’s two fireplaces sit underneath rows of vertical pink bricks that further more add to the space’s rustic warmth.

Brutalist accents continue on one more one particular of the Ace Resort Toronto’s main motifs. Rugged concrete columns complement a pair of volumetric wall canvases by Montreal artist David Umemto, mounted right here on possibly side of the room’s northern fire.

These heavier things distinction the lounge’s light-weight wooden ceilings and wooden-framed furnishings, manufactured all the additional inviting by their marginally vintage appear. A series of patterned rugs solidify the vibe of cozy domesticity.

A further particularly charming touch is the periscope-esque lighting that extends down from the ceiling. In preserving with the Ace Hotel’s behavior of partnering with regional designer-makers, the rooftop bar’s personalized fixtures ended up made by Toronto studio MSDS.

The 50-seat indoor lounge is joined by a 30-seat outdoor patio that seems in excess of a row of grassy planters and out to Toronto’s at any time-evolving skyline.

Evangeline’s inside usually takes on an specially intimate ambiance occur sunset, when its caramel tones truly come to existence. And for those who demonstrate up a bit later on in the night, the shiny lights of the towers out the window introduce one more kind of cinematic glow. For visitors and locals alike, the cozy-satisfies-cosmoplitan space is a testament to Toronto’s special blend of the worldly, woodsy and whimsical.