NOBU V.I.P. Event at Roy Thompson Hall

In Toronto’s famed Roy Thompson Hall, screened for the very first time in front of hundreds of international brokers, Robert De Niro and chef Nobu Matsuhisa, discover an exclusive video interview of Alessandro Munge delivering his interpretation of the NOBU brand and his vision for NOBU Toronto.

The Uniqueness

When we started this project, we started to think about what is Nobu. Who is Nobu and why Nobu in Toronto? One thing about our brand, one thing about us as a design firm is: we hate to be “formula”. Nobu himself is not “formula”. He takes Japanese food and he just blows it up. He makes it exciting.

I want the same thing for this project. For me, I sort of took the approach: if I could think of the interiors like he was creating a dish, it would be a beautiful moment.

The Residences

There was an idea here where residential owners would be able to own a piece of this iconic brand. We have a spectacular piece of architecture. We have a developer that’s bringing something into the city that the city has never seen before. We have a brand that is onboard to doing something that is international yet local to Toronto. All things combined get the end-user, the residential buyer, the investor, excited in something.

The Amenities

We have these two towers facing each other. There are residences that are going to be here. We want these residences to stay excited about what they bought. You’re going to have city views. You’re going to have lake views. There are all kinds of views happening here. However, when you look down, we wanted people to see something special.

We came up with this crazy idea of putting a hole in this podium and this hole penetrates through the slab into a reflecting pond. On the bottom of that, it all opens up to this gym. It’s so symmetrical and so tight in its planning that all the equipment surrounds this beautiful, internal volume of space.

All that I’m describing is what I like to sort of describe as an emotional feeling. We want our hotel guests, our residences and those coming to the restaurant to feel an emotion, a connection. And that’s very difficult to do in design.

That’s why we tend to look at design as a journey rather than just picking furnishes and space planning. I mean that is a component to it but how do you do something different?