For Living Beauty, the health and beauty emporium in Toronto, Odami employed a restrained palette to create a space of quiet ritual and repose.

When Arancha (Aránzazu) González Bernardo and Michael Fohring got the message asking them to design a project that would shine a spotlight on their under-the-radar firm, their first instinct wasn’t to celebrate. “I was telling Mike, ‘This has to be a scam. They’re going to ask us for a credit card number,’ ” González Bernardo says with a laugh. “I kept thinking, ‘Is this real? Is this happening?’ ”

The year was 2021. Odami, the duo’s two-year-old studio, had only one commercial project to show for itself: the cocoon-like Sara Restaurant in Toronto’s Entertainment District. The exciting new client in Odami’s inbox? It was Aesop, the Australian luxury skin-care, hair-care, and fragrance brand known for its immersive, spa-like stores. Aesop was searching for a firm to design two new North American locations, one in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood and another in Palisades Village, Los Angeles. For an emerging architecture and design studio like Odami, the brief was almost too good to be true.

Aesop doesn’t do cookie cutter. The brand (which was established in 1987 and is now owned by L’Oréal) has long sought out designers who will infuse its boutiques with authenticity, making them must-visit destinations. As per Aesop’s website, “It is our intention to weave ourselves into the fabric of place and add something of merit rather than impose a discordant presence, and our consistent practice to use a locally relevant design vocabulary.”

Portrait photo by Odami Studio.

So, in their search for a firm who could help develop a sense of place, Aesop’s global design leads in Paris and New York found Odami on the website of Toronto’s Interior Design Show, where González Bernardo and Fohring were exhibiting a line of furniture made from reclaimed trees. Odami’s focus on chic sustainability was a point of both attraction and connection for the ecologically minded brand.

Fast forward five years, and Odami is sought after not only for its visionary composite of design references but also its principals’ honesty about the challenges of running a small firm. Though the past year has seen it level up its branding, rack up big awards, and win contracts for everything from reimagining an iconic local womenswear store to designing a large Japanese eatery in downtown Toronto, they still wonder from time to time, Is this real? Is this really happening? “We still feel like outsiders in a sense,” González Bernardo says. “Nobody in either of our families is an architect, and we’re not from Toronto. But that’s what makes us different. We’re able to mash our cultural circumstances together for something that makes sense here.”

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“The practice can be very romanticized. We all like to think of it [architecture] as a calling, and that’s lovely, but it’s a business. That never gets spoken about in school.” —Michael Fohring, Odami

 

Being outsiders is what drew the two together in the first place. Raised in Asturias, Spain, as a child of entrepreneurs, González Bernardo was accepted at medical, law, and architecture school before deciding to study architecture at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in La Coruña. Fohring grew up in Ayr, Ontario—at school he showed an aptitude for both art and math, so architecture seemed like the right blend of creativity and pragmatism. They converged in 2012 while working in an architecture firm in Austria—albeit on separate teams. As the only non-German speakers in the office, they bonded. “Our relationship just came out of an affinity as people,” Fohring says. “The personal side flourished, and starting a practice together happened organically.”

At Aesop Yorkville, Odami transformed the shopping experience with a space of subtle surprise and tactile delight.

After meeting in Austria, they moved to Montreal for two years before settling in Toronto. There, González Bernardo’s familial entrepreneurial spirit emerged, and she and Fohring launched Odami in 2018. Apart from Sara Restaurant, Odami worked exclusively on residential properties, renovating a St. Lawrence-area condo and a Deer Park century home. With Aesop, along came the opportunity to expand their commercial work—a move that changed both the tenor and trajectory of the firm’s future. Both founders say they welcomed the opportunity to diversify and showcase different skills. “I love residential, but it’s very personal and a huge emotional investment. Every decision feels so important because it’s their home,” González Bernardo explains. “With retail, there’s perspective that it’s a business and time is of the essence.” Adds Fohring, “Commercial is appealing because it’s fast paced and can be a bit more creative.”

Odami had a lot to live up to creatively. Aesop had previously enlisted global design luminaries like Vincent Van Duysen, Ilse Crawford, and even the Rome-based design studio of film director Luca Guadagnino—whose sets are as much characters in his films as the actors—to launch its site-specific stores. Bracing for “the opinions of different audiences,” González Bernardo and Fohring leaned into the warmth and domesticity of the Yorkville neighbourhood’s origins. They bathed the store’s interior in velvety, merlot-hued paint (Benjamin Moore’s Ruby Dusk) and repurposed maple spindles, which Fohring discovered en masse in a warehouse, as millwork—a nod to the staircases and porches of the area’s Victorian homes.

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“Residential architecture is very personal and a huge emotional investment. With retail, there’s perspective that it’s a business and time is of the essence.” —Arancha González Bernardo, Odami

Reinvention of familiar forms has since become a hallmark of the firm’s work. For the flagship spa and retail space of Living Beauty, a health and beauty emporium on Toronto’s Dupont Street, the challenge was to reinterpret a Parisian apartment. Odami had worked with founder Mariam White on the renovation of her own home, and now she was entrusting them with her vision of an uplifting, caring, and accessible boutique. “The client wanted a space that was the anti-Sephora, very personal and consultation-based,” Fohring says. “She collected a lot of images of Parisian apartments as a lens to reflect that intimate and comfortable experience.” But rather than delivering on the client’s exact inspiration, Odami pivoted. What about an apothecary with old-world touches that was still rooted in the now? The goal: to elicit the same feelings as a Parisian apartment would.

“The French inspiration was strong, but ultimately this store is in Toronto, not Paris,” González Bernardo says. “The location is a heritage building that used to be a Ford plant, so we wanted to embrace the industrial charms, like the columns, and play with different references.” Odami proposed a grand, restaurant-like bar to function as the heartbeat of the space. Soft clay tones establish a refreshingly sophisticated palette, and subtly arched millwork with fluted tambour trim panels add softness and rhythmic texture.

Instead of the chevron wood floors expected of a Parisian apartment, González Bernardo and Fohring opted for terra cotta-coloured porcelain tiles in a concentric pattern that reaches its centre where the retail space transitions to the spa. Odami gently coaxed White away from wood flooring when they pointed out the impracticality for Canadian winters and showed her images of Hermès stores in Paris with irregular floor patterns. “Instead of the standard, let’s go a route no one has seen,” González Bernardo says of the approach. The result is the store’s pièce de résistance.

Another retail-design triumph was Odami’s 2024 transformation of a 5,500-square-foot location of Andrews, a decades-old womenswear retailer with multiple shops across Toronto. Located in the 1960s-era Bayview Village shopping centre, this was González Bernardo and Fohring’s first Andrews transformation, followed by a second at First Canadian Place. Studded with plinths and slabs of calacatta rosenoir marble, the expansive space is arranged as a series of open rooms with five oversized light panels that mimic the natural light outside.

For womenswear retailer Andrews in the Bayview Village shopping centre in Toronto, Odami principals Michael Fohring and Arancha González Bernardo chose to decorate the space using a neutral tone-on-tone palette, with large light panels to highlight key products.

The team’s greatest hits of 2024 continued with Amadeus, a patisserie in another prime Yorkville location at the corner of Bay and Cumberland Streets. Here, curved ceilings fold into the walls as the dramatic marble-clad, L-shaped counter allows the delicacies to shine. All the architectural gestures speak to both the creativity and rigour required for artisanal pastry work.

With its buzzworthy and prolific body of work, one might imagine Odami as a double-digit-sized team. Instead, the two principals work with two part-time team members and several freelance collaborators. They are looking to add a full-time position to the roster. Recently, the duo was invited to speak at Toronto Metropolitan University, where González Bernardo teaches at the School of Interior Design. Their message to the packed lecture hall? Seven practical lessons they’ve learned in the last seven years. “The practice can be very romanticized and glamourized,” Fohring says. “We all like to think of it as a calling, and that’s lovely, but you have to survive. It’s a business. That never gets spoken about in school.”

González Bernardo emphasizes that she and Fohring are eager to pull back the veil for the next generation of architects and designers. “We never had anybody that could give us that advice,” she says. “In our industry, a lot of people want to put forth their best façades. I think we have our defects, like everybody, but we don’t want to pretend to be something we’re not.” Some of the lessons the duo shared included “You Are Not for Everyone,” “Profitability Matters,” and “Red Flags Don’t Turn Green.” Their talk was such a hit, they’ve already lined up three more speaking engagements for early 2026.

With recognition comes awards, and Odami landed two significant ones in 2025: Azure magazine’s Emerging Interiors Firm, and the Ronald J. Thom Award for Early Design Achievement from the Canada Council for the Arts. González Bernardo and Fohring say they’ve gotten a lot of eyeballs on their interiors work, but it was the latter that felt especially meaningful as it is awarded for architecture. “When you’re trying to do something different, you can live in doubt,” González Bernardo says. “Are we doing the right things? Are we standing up for the right things? The recognition tells you you’re on the right path.” Adds Fohring: “We don’t do this for the awards or attention. But it’s certainly validating and encouraging.”

As we wrap up our conversation, Fohring gets up to answer the door—the delivery of a light fixture for their office’s expansion into the adjacent studio. With a curvy-cool new logo and website by Toronto-based experiential marketing studio Superfantastic, Odami has announced its intention to not only grow but to evolve. Next on the agenda: reinventing a heritage home in London, Ontario; a new-build house, two full-gut renovations with an extension, and one full-gut interior reno in Toronto; a café in the Adelaide Centre in the Financial District; a Japanese restaurant on Bay Street; and a contemporary bunkie in Parry Sound—to name a few.

Surely, González Bernardo jokes, their first cottage project proves they’ve arrived on the design scene of weekend getaway-obsessed Toronto. “We’ve been told, ‘You hide behind your work—people don’t see you or know anything about you.’ We’re trying to put ourselves out there more. For a while we were a bit isolated, but now there’s a feeling of belonging in the community.”

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