MONDO CONDO: The ART Condos Model Suites.

Everybody knows that no matter how well-designed a space may be, it looks a lot warmer, spacious and therefore, a lot more enjoyable when it’s furnished.

A condo unit may have vast windows that let the natural light pour in, but nothing opens up a space—windows or not—quite as effectively as pictures on the walls.  And mirrors.  And furniture.  You’d think that furniture would simply clutter a space, but the opposite is true.  A well-placed chair, for example, not only animates a room, it can also appear to double its size.

The two recently opened model suites at Art Condos are remarkable exercises in spatial transformation.  Both were generated by Toronto-based designer Terry Edward Briceland of TEB Interiors, in concert with Design Republic, a Toronto firm with which Briceland often works.

Briceland’s approach to design is eclectic, witty, faux-nostalgic and edgy.   Well-known, in his private practice, for his unforgettably outrageous pillows (there are a good many in the model suites—see the accompanying photos, all provided by Tom Arban Photography Inc.).

Briceland is also big on the strategic positioning of mirrors—invariably BIG mirrors—to amplify one’s sense of interior space.

He is also fond of making lavish use of the big, raw, forceful wall-graphics of Windsor-based, one-time street artist Daniel Bombardier (aka DENIAL) whose huge panels can be seen adding their own brand of rough theatricality to the model suites—along with dynamic graphics by other artists Briceland admires.

Briceland’s sense of design-nostalgia is both quirky and ironic.  He enjoys scattering pieces of dead-tech around the condo-spaces—such as a rusty, defunct adding machine and old public-school globes.

Presumably, he is subscribing to Marshall McLuhan’s insistence that when an old technology is succeeded by a new one, the old one simply turns into art.

His quirkiest form of design nostalgia is to leave a few personal objects lying about—a pair of shoes, for example, or a pair of gloves, or a few books.

“It makes you think somebody actually lives here,” Briceland says.