This Interior Design Office is Also a Cultural Hub

Few offices can simultaneously welcome both employees and community members while also acting as a cultural hub – but that’s precisely what Mason Studio’s 3,800-square-foot (353 square meters) workspace in Toronto does. “Mason Studio is an interior design firm, but we really try to think about interior design in a different way,” said cofounder Stanley Sun. “There’s an opportunity for design to make an impact on people’s day-to-day lives.”

With an art gallery and constantly evolving interior design, the Mason Studio headquarters does not look or act like a typical corporate office. “We decided that we no longer going to be hiding our ideas behind closed doors,” said Sun. “Something that is really important for us is to understand that there is a way to add more value to every square foot that we have.”

When LoopNet toured the space on a grey December morning, the office was hosting an exhibition called "Getting to Know Our Neighbours" at The Gallery in collaboration with nonprofit Making Art Making Change, which is dedicated to giving voice to social communities through art, and the Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood and Community Health Centre. “We always have something going on,” Sun said. “It’s a place where people can feel that they have a home, whether it’d be for staff or the community.”

The community, neighbours or students from the French-language school next door, for example, is always invited in to drop by to look at art in the gallery or attend events like art openings or academic lectures. Mason Studio is considering making its materials library available to other designers in the area.

Mason Studio is firmly rooted in its neighbourhood of Pelham Park/The Junction in Toronto. Sun and cofounding partner Ashley Rumsey started the business from their kitchen tables, then moved to their first small office in The Junction, known to be a design and arts community.

When it was time to look for a bigger space, Sun and Rumsey were keen to stay in the area. “Our hearts were always in The Junction because it really started our careers,” Sun said. “The community was so supportive of us and a lot of our friends are fabricators in that area.”

They looked everywhere before coming across the space that they now own, a former welding shop in a string of industrial spaces on Pelham Avenue located next to the train tracks. According to Sun, the space sits in a community that is underserved and has a lot of community housing. “It was important for us to be in a community that felt like they would enjoy what we wanted to offer to them,” he said.

And people do enjoy Mason’s Studio creative approach, according to Sun. Their clients pick Mason Studio’s office for meetings because they want to see what is happening in the space. “It’s not only fun, but it creates a more light-hearted and playful environment,” Sun said.

As opposed to the interior design of most offices, which tend to remain static for years, Mason Studio’s modus operandi is to continually evolve, with art installations rotating on a regular basis and furniture moving around often. “People change, and sometimes our interests change and the world changes,” said Sun.

For instance, the firm reworked one of its spaces based on how it saw employees using it. A bright room with a green wall on the mezzanine now features a low table and small benches that are very low to the ground. This room used to be furnished with sofas and a coffee machine for coffee breaks, but people ended up working there all day, and perhaps more interestingly, were sitting on the ground, noted Sun. “I loved that because I never thought of it, but in fact, when we are at home, watching TV or with kids, we are sitting on the floor and it is really healthy for our bodies, so we just thought that it would be fun for people to sit differently,” Sun said. “People need to stretch their bodies, not just for physical health, but for mental health too.”

The Mason Studio headquarters consists of a ground floor with a mezzanine and includes lounge spaces, a materials library that doubles as a conference room, a meeting room, and a kitchen and coffee station.

There is also a library space at the back of the mezzanine, with monitors that employees can plug their laptops into, which was inspired by Sun and Rumsey’s days at university. “The place where I worked the best personally was at the library,” Sun said. “You have books around you, and when you’re bored you just wander around and you grab a book, and you talk to people and you see who else is around, so we tried to create that same idea.”

The library space has a great selection of books about a wide array of topics, from design to psychology to fiction, and it operates on a book-exchange basis, so the selection tends to be fluid as well. Since the space has proven to be so popular with the team, in the future it might be transformed again to make room for more desks. “These are books that we can donate to the library or to community groups, but those shelves will always be useful, so we are always trying to figure out how we can change spaces to make it work for future growth,” Sun said.

If growth is important to Mason Studio, so is being in sync with the industrial heritage of the building and of the founders’ families. Mason Studio takes its name from Sun’s and Rumsey’s grandparents, who were stonemasons, and pays tribute to the fabricators who make their projects come to life.

With that in mind, Sun wanted to maintain the industrial qualities of the building to honor its past life while elevating it. Sun and Rumsey purchased the building during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020 and began renovations in early 2021, which took about a year. The office officially opened in September 2022, and the team has been working in the studio for over a year.

For Sun, being both the client and the designer at the same time was particularly challenging. “We had to make sure that we were making smart, strategic decisions with the building but also that we were getting the most out of the design,” he noted.

When Sun and Rumsey started renovating the space, the first thing that they focused on was taking care of the base building work, so they upgraded the plumbing, the insulation, the mechanical systems and the HVAC to make the industrial space comfortable for people to be in. Then they wanted to make it feel like a gallery space and a workspace without ignoring the industrial aspect.

They wanted to make the front area, which used to be a garage for trucks and now features the art gallery, as public and visible as possible. The team removed the garage doors, added large windows, and took down as many walls as possible to allow people to see what’s going on inside.

Natural light was a fundamental aspect of the design. A large window was pierced in the back wall in the materials library, offering a glimpse of the train tracks. A few skylights were also added on the roof. “We wanted to add even more, but because there is so much mechanical on the roof, we couldn’t,” Sun noted. “In the summer, it actually gets really bright, so we have shades, but when they’re not out, people like to wear sunglasses inside because it does get quite bright,” Sun said, laughing.

The skylights also allow for privacy without sacrificing natural light, which is rare in a city as noisy and busy as Toronto. For instance, a meeting room at the back of the space is illuminated by a skylight, making the space feel private yet airy. “Usually when we think about light, we think about putting in another window that looks outward where we can see the activity, which is nice sometimes, being part of the city,” Sun said. “But a lot of our work is very introspective, it’s really about concentration and thinking.”

The renovation had to be done on a budget, which created some constraints but also some stellar solutions. Curtains along one of the side walls, for example, help to cover up some of the industrial ruggedness of the building, absorb sound and make the space feel more homey. Not only that, but they add “a little bit of drama,” Sun said. “We are always joking that when we have our presentations, we put everything up on the brick wall and close the curtains so when clients come over, we just kind of pull the curtains back and reveal it all.”

Revealing art is also an important part of the Mason Studio ethos, whose art installations keep changing, from a water-based art installation, “Refuge in the Water,” to a suspended seven-foot island installation, “Refuge in the Sky,” which both relate to humans’ relationship to nature. “We actually think that art installations are more exaggerated forms of interior design, so we can see how people react, how they form memories in the space,” Sun said.

In the future, Sun wants Mason studio to host more academic happenings as well. “For us, art is important, but academia is important too, so we invite different institutions to have lectures here, and we have a lot of talks and community events,” Sun said. “Overall, what we are trying to do is to add more value to office space.”