9th Annual Best of Canada Design Competition

411 Offset: Room at the Gladstone Hotel, Toronto

The renovated, formerly run-down Gladstone Hotel is now a hip watering hole for Toronto’s Queen Street West arts community. In 2005, the Gladstone held a competition for artists and designers to decorate rooms in the historic hostelry.

Heather Dubbeldam and Tania Ursomarzo maintained the as-found conditions of Room 411 while creating a new room-within-a-room. They erected a cage-like representation of walls, ceiling and floor. Then they created a continuous band of lighting that wraps horizontally around the walls and incorporates the three lighting components called for in the competition brief: a reading lamp, bedside lamps and an overhead light.

A second, smaller vertical light strip adjacent to the closet millwork doubles as closet lighting and functions as a stand-alone night-light.

Light-fixture covers are made of C-shaped white acrylic diffusers that glow when illuminated. The custom-made diffusers are fastened to aluminum angles mounted to the wall and are easily removable for bulb replacement.


Levitt: This is nicely thought-out. To use an important word that we haven’t heard often enough this afternoon, it’s innovative.

Taylor: I like the way they took the window height as their datum.

Sorensen: I’m excited by how they solved their lighting problem, but I’m not sure how they got there. They missed the boat by not including a night shot, especially if the horizontal band is the only light source in the main room.