The café in the lobby of Montreal’s Wilder Building attracts passersby with its whimsy. The ceiling is adorned with floating pink tutus, and the tables are topped with tassel-fringed lamps. The fantastic space is the latest addition to a building that started life as something quite quotidian.

Pooya Baktash, Jonathan Friedman, and Alex Josephson, the trio that make up the Toronto-based studio Partisans, approach architecture not just as a discipline but as a social statement.

Alessandro Studio Munge NUVO

The founder and principle of Studio Munge has a focused, narrative driven style that shapes the finer elements of interior design.

Moss & Lam, FYI Design, Summer 2018

If the name “Deborah Moss” isn’t familiar, it’s because for a long time she has been a “secret resource of top interior designers.”

Mischa Couvrette, Inquiring Minds, Spring 2018

The Ottawa-born, Toronto-based creative has achieved what many independent designers can only dream of.

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Macramé is often considered campy, not classy (blame those strange owls with the off-putting wooden eyes). Sally England, a Michigan-based fibre artist, is helping to revive and modernize the knot-based craft in a way that even the most discerning design lover could appreciate.

NUVO Magazine Spring 2015: Thoreaux Wallpaper

On the front windows of Whitman Emorson, a strategic design consultancy in Toronto’s west end, dozens of paper stars cascade across the panes. From the street, the celestial bodies look like origami.

NUVO magazine: JM&Sons

As far as furniture makers go, Andre Jr. Ayotte (who simply goes by Junior) and Mackenzie Duncan, co-founders of the Toronto-based studio JM&Sons, each have odd resumés for the job. They both hand-make excellent condo-sized tables, chairs, and shelving. But neither of the friend ever studied carpentry or woodworking or industrial design.

NUVO summer 2014: Dror Benchetrit

The utter abstractness of a Mark Rothko canvas or the shocking sparseness of a Donald Judd installation may seem like odd inspiration for a modular kitchen system. Minimalist art, after all, is by its very nature impractical. Our cook spaces, on the other hand, have to perform a multitude of hard, fast, and often messy functions.

NUVO Daily Edit: ICFF

The International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) is held every spring during NYCxDesign (New York’s design week). It’s a dizzying spectacle that draws almost 30,000 visitors. After sitting on, treading over, and just plain admiring the collections all weekend, here are six of our favourite highlights.