Why We Design and Manufacture in the Heart of Mile End

Design is never formed in isolation. It is shaped by what we see, experience, remember, and absorb over time—the architecture around us, the streets we move through, the places we travel to, the objects we encounter, and the way people inhabit space. Mile End is part of that broader collection of influences: the immediate context in which we work, test ideas, and make things every day.

Our home is Montreal’s Mile End—a neighbourhood shaped by a particular mix of architecture, industry, workshops, studios, residences, cafés, streets, and people. It functions, in many ways, as a living laboratory for light, shadow, scale, and human interaction.

Our presence here is also a matter of continuity. Our former company was located just one block away, and returning to this neighbourhood felt less like choosing a location than continuing a relationship with a place we already knew intimately.

Keeping design, development, prototyping, and assembly under one roof maintains a direct connection between the idea and the object. The person drawing a detail remains close to the person making it. Materials can be handled, prototypes tested, and decisions refined in real time.

We also maintain a principled refusal of the suburban office and industrial typology. We are not drawn to the isolation of the featureless steel box, surrounded by parking lots and disconnected from the life of the street. Too often, these environments are designed almost exclusively around efficiency, at the expense of pedestrian life, urban continuity, and the connections that make a place feel inhabited rather than merely occupied.

For a practice concerned with light, that distinction matters. Light is not an abstract technical quantity. It reveals architecture, establishes atmosphere, supports orientation, and helps define the spaces in which people gather, work, move, and live.

To design light while remaining connected to that everyday urban experience simply makes sense to us.