CARV Projects

Project 901: currently available at 901 King St West. A landlord turnkey model suite designed to lease.

The front lounge had an irregular footprint. Not a rectangular space. A room with its own geometry that needed to be worked with.

We started with the floor plan.

An angular sofa mirrors the lines of the room rather than contradicting them. Where a standard sectional creates visual friction, this piece creates flow. A vintage marble coffee table anchors the seating group. Solid, grounded, heavy enough to balance the angularity around it and the 15-foot ceiling above.

A low bookshelf defines circulation without closing the space off. Accent chairs and layered lighting bring intimacy to a room that could otherwise feel uncommitted.

Every piece in direct conversation with the room's own footprint.

In commercial interior design, a model suite has one job: help prospective tenants see themselves in the space. Not just appreciate it. Picture themselves working inside it. The right tenant walks through this lounge and doesn't think about the floor plan at all. They think about where they'd put their morning coffee.

When a tenant stops noticing the room and starts imagining working in it, design has done exactly what it was meant to do.

Would you have your morning coffee in this space?

Tell us where you'd sit.

Interior Design: CARV Projects / Toronto Interior Design Firm
Landlord: Crown Realty Partners
Professional Photography: KIELY RAMOS ◦ Toronto Interior & Architectural Photographer
Toronto commercial interior design · landlord turnkey suite · model suite design · commercial office interiors · boutique interior design studio

// ARTICHOKE HOUSE : THE DINING ROOM

From the very beginning, this room had a clear brief.

A family of four, newly settled in the outskirts of Toronto, knew exactly what they needed here. Not a formal dining room kept for guests. A room built for the life they actually live.

The weeknight dinners. The homework spread across the table at 4pm before it gets cleared for plates at 6. The holiday gatherings that stretch past midnight. The ordinary moments that quietly become the ones a family remembers most.

That brief shaped every decision we made.

At the centre of it: the table.

This family wanted something worth gathering around for generations. A piece made with intention, built to last, and made locally. We worked with Acre Made Furniture on a beautifully handcrafted, locally made dining table that anchors the entire room; the kind of piece that gets handed down, that carries a family's history inside the grain of the wood.

We designed everything else in the space to match that quiet intention. It feels warm, but never heavy. Layered, but not loud. A dining room has a tough job: it has to handle the messy, everyday moments just as gracefully as a milestone celebration. We wanted this space to know how to do both."

No walls touched. No structural changes.
Just the right decisions, made for a wonderful family.

The Artichoke House continues. 🌿

What's the piece of furniture in your home you'd never part with?

Interior Design: CARV Projects / Toronto Interior Design Firm
Toronto interior designer · residential interior design · The Kingsway · Bloor West Village · Summerhill · Forest Hill · Rosedale

“Can we start our renovation in 4 weeks?” I wanted to say yes.

We get this question constantly. But the reality is: an average small-to-mid size renovation can take 9 to 12 months from the day you hire your Toronto interior designer. Large-scale projects and new builds take even longer.

Here is how that timeline actually breaks down:

▪️ Project Kick-off: Deep-dive onboarding and exact site measures.

▪️ Design Development (6-12 weeks): Finalizing layouts, fixtures, and finishes. Rush this, and you’ll change your mind mid-construction.

▪️ Construction Drawings (6-8 weeks): The technical blueprints contractors price from and the city issues permits against.

▪️ Permit Review (6-10+ weeks): Entirely up to the municipality.

▪️ Construction Kick-off (Months, not weeks): Good contractors are booked out, and custom materials take time to arrive.

None of these stages overlap. They typically stack.

When a contractor prices a completed design, you get an accurate number. When they price an incomplete scope, they estimate the gaps. Estimates become change orders, and change orders become the expensive budget conversation nobody wants to have on site.

The clients finishing beautifully this Summer? They called last September. Summer is precisely when the clients breaking ground next May start planning.

If you want to break ground next year, the clock starts now. Book an intro call through our bio and we’ll start the conversation.

Save this timeline for your future project, or send it to the person who keeps saying “maybe next year.”

Interior Design: CARV Projects / Toronto Interior Design Firm
Toronto interior designer · home renovation planning · residential interior design · GTA & Beyond · boutique design studio

“Oh, you do residential and commercial?”

Usually with a slight pause after the “and” that says more than the question does.

The pressure to specialise is real. And for a long time, I listened to it. Even before the industry told me to. I remember it in school. Residential was always the less celebrated discipline. Less rigorous. Less serious. I absorbed that without realising it.

When I started CARV, I was self-conscious about it. Professional rooms raised an eyebrow when residential work came up. As if doing both meant committing to neither.

I felt that judgement. And then I stopped listening to it.

Commercial design taught me how environments perform. Residential taught me how people actually live. One without the other produces half the picture. Together, they make me a better designer in each.
And when you’ve designed for the same client across both, their workspace and their home, something shifts. You don’t just know the brief. You know the person it belongs to.

Do the work that sparks your light. The right clients will find you because of what you do, not in spite of the range of it.

To every creative professional who has ever been made to feel their range is a liability. It isn’t. The ones who told you to stay in your lane were describing their own limitations, not yours.

What’s the best career advice you were given that turned out to be completely wrong for you?

Interior Design: CARV Projects / Toronto Interior Design Firm

Toronto interior designer | residential interior designer | commercial interior designer Toronto | boutique interior design studio | women in business

// THE ARTICHOKE ROOM

A family of four had just moved in.

The house was theirs. It didn't feel like it yet.

The husband is a classical music composer and professor. The brief, underneath everything, was the same one most families bring us: make it feel like us. For this room, that meant starting with the piano: not placing it in a space, but building the space around it.

We went through green after green. Most were beautiful. Most were wrong. Benjamin Moore Artichoke held differently: warm across every light, every hour of the day. It was also the right acoustic choice. Saturated matte finishes absorb sound differently than reflective ones. In a room built around a piano, the walls needed to work with the music.

We called it Artichoke from that day forward. The name started as shorthand. It became a running joke with the family. By the time the room was finished, it had a name the way rooms in a well-loved home earn them.

Katie’s Wallpaper Installation installed Belarte | design e papelaria personalizada's panoramic European countryside mural behind the sofa. Rolling fields, open sky. When you sit here, the eye has somewhere to travel while the ears are occupied.

The bookshelves anchored the opposite wall. None were custom built. Every piece was sourced and styled to read as though it had always belonged, chosen specifically for this family, this room.

On the last day of installation, the husband sat down at the baby grand piano and played one piece.

The family gathered. We stayed and listened together.

Interior Design: CARV Projects / Toronto Interior Design Firm
Professional Photography: KIELY RAMOS ◦ Toronto Interior & Architectural Photographer
Mural: belarteSTUDIO Wallpaper

Toronto interior design | Whitby interior designer | residential interior design | Benjamin Moore Artichoke | music room design | home transformation | bespoke interior styling

Visiting an Experimental Group hotel changes the way you see design.

I spent an afternoon at Cowley Manor in the Cotswolds; walking the grounds, lingering in the restaurant, sitting in spaces long enough to understand them. Spending far more time staring up at the ceilings than I probably should have.

And I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Not because it was the most luxurious property I’ve walked through. It wasn’t trying to be. Most spaces in this category work hard to attain a recognisable version of luxury; the muted palette, the polished surfaces, the studied restraint that signals wealth without saying anything interesting about it.

Cowley Manor wasn’t performing. It was just breathing.

Confident enough to leave things a little rough where rough felt right. The history was in the walls, not smoothed over them. The colours were fearless. The textures were deeply, unapologetically tactile. Nothing felt assembled. Everything felt collected; over time, by someone with a genuine point of view.

This is the Experimental Group’s philosophy: restraint paired with personality, spaces built for real experience rather than formal performance, rooms that make you feel something before you’ve worked out why.

I walked out thinking about the difference between a space that performs luxury and a space that simply has conviction. They can look the same in a photograph.
You feel the difference the moment you walk in.

That feeling is what we work toward at CARV. Not the always most expensive room in the building, but the most intentional one.

A beautiful space is achievable with the right budget.
A space with conviction is harder.
And far more memorable.

Have you ever walked into a space that changed the way you see design? What was it about it that did that? ↓ . .
hospitality design | interior design inspiration | Experimental Group | Cotswolds hotel design | boutique interior design studio

Somewhere, a prospective tenant walks past this building. They weren’t planning to stop.
And then something through the glass catches their attention, and they do.

That moment, before the showing, before the agent, before a single conversation about square footage or lease terms, is where a lease begins or doesn’t.

Most model suites do their job well. They show the space. They demonstrate the potential. They answer the practical questions.

An elevated model suite does something different. It makes the decision feel easier, inevitable.

At Project 901, every choice was made in service of that feeling, including this one. The Iris pendant wasn’t a finishing detail; it was an intentional decision made early on. With a 15-foot ceiling, it pulls the eye upward before it ever settles on what’s below. It anchors the lounge, gives every piece beneath it a reason to exist in relation to something larger, and tells anyone who glances through the glass that this space is entirely intentional.

A suite that feels considered leases differently than one that simply functions. Not because one is wrong and the other is right.

But because a tenant who feels something in a space makes a faster decision than one who simply understands it.

That is the value of an elevated first impression.
Not luxury for its own sake, but intention, expressed through every detail.

Does your suite make its case before anyone walks in? ↓

Interior Design: CARV Projects / Toronto Interior Design Firm
Client: Crown Realty Partners
GC: Index Construction
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Toronto interior design | commercial interior design | model suite design | statement lighting | commercial interior designer Toronto

The real measure of a client relationship isn't the final reveal.

It's the call that comes after.

The first project with a client is a collaboration between two people still learning to trust each other. By the second, something has shifted. The brief becomes a conversation that picks up where the last one left off.

By then, I know them. How they move through a space. What makes them feel at ease. What they've always wanted but never quite known how to ask for.

This is the kind of design work that accumulates quietly, and that builds trust over time. That makes every next project feel less like a commission and more like a continuation.

I am so grateful for the clients who have (and continue to) come back. Who trust us not just with one space, but with the next chapter of it. And the one after that.

That, to us, means everything.

What's a professional relationship in your life that has deepened the longer it's existed? ↓

Toronto interior design | interior designer Toronto | boutique interior design studio | residential interior designer | commercial interior designer Toronto