The Job

The tenant is Slalom Consulting, a Seattle-based strategic management firm looking to expand its foothold in the 416. The property is 85 Richmond St. W., a limestone-and-brick heritage property undergoing significant square-foot expansion. The timeline is tight: three months for three floors, including the winter holiday season, while the interior expansion is still underway.

The Vision

Slalom Consulting envisioned a sleek, exposed, high-tech workspace with personalized details: automated sit-stand desks, two-top collaboration stations, floating ceilings, and even a kegerator. The design integrated the unique features into a vibrantly-coloured, herringbone-floored space—hip headquarters for the firm’s young Toronto team.

The Space

Slalom’s tenancy encompassed three of the tower’s 11 storeys; as the square footage of each of those floors expanded, the workspace of each level was completely reimagined. The buildout was extensive, covering a total of 40,156 square feet of useable space. Acoustic ceiling panels that precluded direct core drilling were a particularly complex feature of the massive blank slate.

The Challenges

It is rare to undertake an interior buildout while the remainder of the building renovation is underway; the overlapping timeline presents a host of unique
challenges, especially when interior building systems, and even freight elevators, are not yet operational. Warranties for recently-completed interior work stand to be voided by new tenant construction, transferring the liability to the client. Edify facilitated extensive coordination between the original constructors, the building’s management, and the tenant to protect its clients from any prospective accountability and cost overruns.

The time frame was tight considering the other unique challenges of the job. A three-month turnaround, inclusive of a three-week furniture installation, left little room for error or unforeseen site conditions.

Despite the complex construction circumstances and tight timeline, Edify was able to achieve Slalom’s budget target by adjusting initial design work to meet the client’s financial goals. Final project costing achieved a minimal six-per-cent contingency – which, while incorporating additional client asks, proved a significant success.