PARTISANS designs stunning interior to rival the art nouveau histories of Barcelona’s famed ‘pintxo’ bars
Bar Raval is a 21st-century response to Spanish Art Nouveau design. The brainchild of celebrated Canadian chef Grant van Gameren and wunderkind mixologists Mike Webster and Robin Goodfellow, Raval introduces Toronto to the ‘pintxo’ bar – a tapas-style bar that is a cornerstone of social and gastronomic culture in northern Spain. Following the success of Bar Isabel, van Gameren handpicked PARTISANS to execute an ambitious vision for his next location: to create ‘an art piece’ – a space that would become an enduring Toronto institution.
The exquisite bar acts as a surreal and sensational food and design stage for chef Grant van Gameren and renowned mixologist Mike Webster to showcase their skills and wow their customers. Named after ‘el raval’, a once seedy district in the Catalan capital, crafted from sculpted mahogany, the bar transports you into an entirely different world that is draped
in wood and metal, and brings together the compositional beauty of the contemporary world with the eclectic charm of Spanish Art Nouveau.
“Working with Pooya, Alex,
and the rest of their team was inspiring,” says van Gameren. “From the early conceptual planning all the way through to the final stages of construction, they pushed us to envision beyond what we imagined possible. And as our vision grew, their dedication, honesty, and commitment to actualizing every minute detail surpassed all our expectations.”
The team got to work on a design concept that would transform
the rundown commercial space in Little Italy into an almost sentient architectural sculpture. Carefully hewn from what look like unbroken Mobius strips of sinuous mahogany, the interior design is fundamentally corporeal. In a stand-up-only environment, the rippled – and rippling – surfaces encourage patrons to get comfortable, lean into their soft edges, and become a part of the woodwork. Raval’s molten quality fosters fluid circulation and close encounters, honoring the spirit of its Spanish pintxo counterparts. Its sculptural aesthetic is also intended to mirror muscle tissue.
Part of what distinguishes PARTISANS is their design team’s technological appetite and agility. “Bar Raval was an opportunity for us to use advanced digital methods to reinterpret – not replicate – classical Art Nouveau tropes for
the 21st century,” says PARTISANS co-founder Alex Josephson. The team developed a highly detailed digital model of the space in
order to develop prefabricated components that could be inserted directly into the building’s existing fabric with minimal disruption. In order to realize PARTISANS’ novel tool paths, the team worked directly with fabricators MCM Inc, who in turn enlisted Mastercam to adjust the software code they would eventually use to mill over 9 km of engravings on 75 panels of wood.
“The design developed out of a connection between the formal histories of art nouveau, the plethora of cured slabs of meat, and the anatomy of the chefs themselves: a tattooed muscle bound group of intellectuals,” explains Josephson. “Our design is a three dimensional tattoo manifest in pure CNC’d mahogany.”
Spread across 200 sqm, the sculpted mahogany interiors fill the entirety of the volume. The wood is sculpted into voluptuous bulges and scored with an intricate pattern of lines generated by computer code. Further, the bar itself is solid, oiled to a lustrous finish; a little terraced protrusion on top that evokes architectural models, or the stump of an ancient hardwood tree.
While Raval is introducing a new culinary genre to Toronto, its other chief objective is to elevate mixology to the heights of a culinary art. PARTISANS was challenged to re-evaluate the functional aspects of the classic bar and reimagine it as a stage for performance, interaction, and awe. The team also worked closely with engineers to develop customized acoustics and a tailor-made sound system.
The result is a marvel. For those who have braved the daily lineups to get into the bar, they describe feeling as though they’ve exited Toronto and entered an entirely different world. Passers-by can also admire the artistry – the handcrafted steel latticework PARTISANS designed to clad the front and side windows. But like van Gameren’s mouth-watering pinxtos, the filigree only offers a tantalizing taste of what lies within.
“Bar Raval will be as much
an art piece as a restaurant; the architects we hired are the only people in Canada and perhaps the world capable of achieving my vision for one of the greatest bars in the world,” concludes van Gameren.