Montreal design firm Ivy Studio has spent the better part of a decade making the city’s commercial interiors more interesting than they have any right to be. Minnibar, opened in spring 2026, might be the studio’s most disciplined outing yet.
The 160-square-metre restaurant and café occupies the ground floor of a downtown high-rise, with roughly six-metre ceilings and full-height glazing wrapping two sides of the corner unit. The menu is contemporary Italian, built around meticulously crafted pizza and pasta. The interior looks east—to the atmospheric principles of Japanese minimalism.
Raw Concrete Meets Refined Restraint
The near-square plan is organised around an enclosed central core containing the kitchen, bar and pizza counter. Guests enter into the daytime café, and as they move around that volume the room slides—without ceremony or signage—into the restaurant.
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A long counter runs the front window, bridging the morning coffee crowd and the evening dinner service, before dropping in height to form an intimate omakase-style perch in front of the fully exposed pizza oven. Beyond it: movable tables, a single banquette, and an angled, monolithic DJ booth squared up to the entrance sightline.
“Minnibar works with its raw shell,” explain the designers. Concrete floor, formidable columns, walls and ceiling slab are left untouched, with ducts and conduits fully visible. Against that grit, the palette is strictly monochromatic—off-white and grey, punctuated by sharp black—and given depth through hand-plastered walls, heavily textured stone, opaque stained timber and translucent textiles. A triangular motif is threaded through the millwork with real persistence.
It’s a familiar tension in contemporary hospitality design: the urge to soften an industrial shell versus the instinct to let it speak. Few rooms pull off both at once. This one manages it because the rough surfaces and the delicate additions never actually compete—they occupy different visual registers, and the transition between them feels deliberate rather than decorative.
That balance extends to the custom furnishings, which do the heavy lifting. A cream stone bar counter in a heavy leather finish sits on an angled stainless steel footrest, backed by black timber and a wine cellar glimpsed through triangular windows.
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The omakase counter is finished entirely in white oak, with low stools in round camel velvet—the warm, obvious heart of the room. In the dining area, black-stained tables on triangular bases meet Ivy Studio’s first in-house chair design: ashwood stained a bespoke opaque soft yellow, its heavy curved legs resolving into a delicate backrest.
Lighting tempers all that volume. A dropped, wrap-around structure of white-stained timber rods and backlit rice paper glows above the central counters and reads from the street after dark, while the upper glazing gets the same treatment to soften the daylight. A central art screen with controllable light sources lets the room be recut by mood, and slatted panels conceal secondary lighting while quietly fixing the acoustics.
Raw downtown shell, refined Japanese calm, a pizza oven and a turntable. It shouldn’t hold together as neatly as it does. The studio’s earlier work in the city has often leaned on bold colour blocks or sculptural lighting, but here the restraint is what makes the space feel complete. Even the passage from café to restaurant is handled without a single visual cue—just a shift in seating and light. It is a quiet kind of confidence, and it suits the room well.
