About the Neighbourhood – TYPE Books.

Mabel’s bakery finds a new home on Queen West

Mabel’s Bakery at 323 Roncesvalles Avenue has been an oasis of great baked goods and specialty foods for about four years now. About six weeks ago, owner Lorraine Hawley opened a second Mabel’s–at 1156 Queen street West. It will be …

Design we love: Lotte lamps at INabstracto

We dropped in to INabstracto a few days ago to chat with owner Kate Eisen, and it was only when we were leaving that we noticed the delicious still-life she had made from grouping five Lotte lamps together on a …

Design we love: Julie Jenkinson of Verso

Designer Julie Jenkinson has just opened her own small and charming design shop at the rear of Kate Eisen’s INabstracto. The place is wittily called Verso (as in “what is on the other side of the page?”). We spoke …

Design we love: Kate Eisen of INabstracto

Kate Eisen’s store, INabstracto: Mid Century Modern Furniture & Design, is as much a design museum and gallery as it is a retail outlet for historically significant design objects. We talked to her a few days ago about what INabstracto …

Design we love: Freitag messenger bags

The Swiss design firm Freitag has been creating its unique, ecologically impeccable line of bags since 1993. They are made of recycled truck tarpaulins, unraveled seat belts, old bicycle inner tubes and recycled airbags. The company’s Top Cat bag is …

The art of mate drinking

The graceful and sociable art of drinking Mate — the traditional South American infused tea made from steeped leaves and twigs of the yerba mate plant — is so complex, one really needs instruction of what is actually a whole …

Woolfitt’s: staffed by artists, for artists

Ben Woolfitt has been a painter for forty years and, for the same amount of time, has run his famous art supply store on Queen Street West. We talked to him recently about both his art and his business.

Woolfitt’s …

Design we love: Is driftwood making a comeback?

We remember (admittedly, it was quite a long time ago) when driftwood was considered to be a really chic design accent–people were putting soft, sinuous hunks of it here and there (on mantlepieces, on bookshelves, in the corners of rooms). …

Design we love: Herman Miller meets Julie Jenkinson

Here’s a charming example of revitalization. For her sprightly reimagining of  classic Herman Miller seating designs from the 1970s (by Don Chadwick), Toronto-based designer Julie Jenkinson has reupholstered the chairs in her crisp Animaze fabric, silkscreening her drawings onto 100% …

Design we love: Prairie tables

What might first appear as mere abstract detailing in the eccentric shapes of these sleek, white, interlocking tables turns out to have geographic meaning: the tables, which have MDF tops and solid ash legs, actually come in the shape of …

Design we love: black cat lamp

We were both attracted and, at first, a bit put off by the funky directness of this little lamp. Its tasteful black shade is profoundly belied by the body of the map—which is a feral-looking black cat-made of fired clay!…

Design we love: Buddha machines

Maybe there ought to be a column in this blog called Design That Simply Catches Our Fancy—a place to explore objects that, while they may not kick the history of design ahead by much, are, nevertheless, attractive and pleasing.

Like …

Design we love: the Duke lamp

This guileless-looking but somehow cheerfully forceful lamp–the Duke table lamp by Salgado Saucier of Milford, Pennsylvania–is made of resin with a silk shade. According to Hanson Tan of Industrial Storm you can have the lamp “in any colour in the …

Art we love: Art Brownies

These hotly coloured, inventively composed mini-blocks of art activity are, in fact, Art Brownies: small, unique works of art made by various artists, both local and international, on one standard format, each Art Brownie being a mini-canvas consisting of a …

John Petcoff of Little Lennox

As well as being a tireless and successful restauranteur–see our video about his seafood eatery, Oyster Boy–John Petcoff is also passionate about art and about running a gallery.

His former art gallery, Lennox International, was at Queen West and …

Design we love: the GT rocker

We were struck by the clean, classic beauty of this modernist rocking chair at STYLEGARAGE on Queen Street West. We grew even more impressed when we found the sleek—and almost absurdly comfortable chair—was designed and built right on the premises.…