KiWe Kitchen

With Harold Madi.

The opportunity to redesign a landmark restaurant in an established, but rapidly changing neighbourhood brings a distinctive set of possibilities and problems.  King Street West is an old neighbourhood that has been through a recent and extensive transformation.  Innocenti was a restaurant that had occupied an important corner of the neighbourhood for over twenty years.  The restaurant and its owner had become a fixture in the neighbourhood, offering affordable but warm food and atmosphere.  Despite this the restaurant hadn’t kept up with the dynamic changes around it.  The new owners had a vision for the restaurant that kept the old warm neighbourhood feel while at the same time providing a flexible and beautiful space that fit the new design-savvy residents of King West.  The restaurant needed to engage the street to truly connect it to the neighbourhood.  It needed to connect its own disparate parts, and come together as a unified space. And it needed to do this while maintaining a flexible interior that facilitated café dining, cocktail hour drinks, and more formal lunches and dinners. The new name for the restaurant underlines this connection:  KiWe (short for King Street West) clearly pronounces its connection to the neighbourhood of which it is a part.  The design for this space became about connections: to the neighbourhood, between the parts of the building, and perhaps most importantly to its patrons.