Sara Restaurant, Toronto Commercial Interior, Canadian Architecture, Images
Sara Restaurant in Toronto
Intimate Commercial Development, Ontario, Canada – design by Odami
6 Sep 2019
Sara Restaurant
Design: Odami
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Cell phones have become as ubiquitous on our tabletops as our plates and cutlery. Perched amongst our meals and utensils, they relentlessly pull towards other people and places, interrupting the delight and the ritual of sharing a meal with company.

The concept for Sara Restaurant in Toronto?s Entertainment District imagined a more intimate setting, where guests could abandon their devices and be more present in the act of dining together. For emerging design studio Odami, it was important to provide a profound sense of place on one hand and a sense of calm on the other. This was achieved with a dedicated focus on texture, materiality, and atmosphere, offering a tangibility that the material-less and place-less realm of the Web can not.
The restaurant is converted from a former Victorian townhouse from the early 1900s. The 50+ seat, 2,400 square foot restaurant was an architectural exercise in striking the right balance between preserving the building?s domestic character and maximizing its potential as a commercial space.

Several layers of paint on the exterior were removed to reveal the building?s original character, exposing the red and yellow brickwork which had been hidden for decades. To play with the proportions ...