Photography by Riley Snelling Photography
Toronto’s Stackt Market bills itself as North America’s largest shipping-container market, a marketplace comprising shipping containers instead of stalls. Here, specialty coffee purveyor Milky’s opened its second Toronto location. The “Cloud Room” moniker comes from lighting effects, mimicking the shadows cast by clouds slowly crossing the sky, projected by concealed intelligent light fixtures onto the cream-coloured travertine walls and ceiling. The theme of formal, repetitive inlay patterns continues in the herringbone parquet flooring. Full Fat Design credits Batay-Csorba Architects with the pattern for the custom, machine-sculpted travertine marquetry surfaces as well as the project’s “architectural language.” Batay-Csorba, in turn, explains that the system’s modular logic produces “a high-contrast tessellation that expands and contracts, shifts and realigns in a series of strata, enveloping the customer in a ‘caffeinated’ space.” All other elements within the shop are subservient to this graphic counterpoint: brewing equipment is powder-coated white to fade into the background while display shelves rest on travertine wall mounts whose profile is an extrusion of the triangle that forms part of the repetitive pattern language.
