Candy Loft is a renovation in Toronto by SUSA that keeps a heritage factory's timber columns and stonework as the feature inside a single, sculptural home.
Toronto’s stretch of Queen Street West is lined with industrial buildings that have been reused and renamed. The Candy Factory Lofts is one such building. It has worn several identities since it went up in 1907 – a textile mill first, then a site of labour organising, then, in the 1990s, one of the city’s earliest large-scale conversions of an industrial shell into residential lofts, helping bring people back to live in a part of the city centre that had emptied out. Underneath all of it sits an even older geography: the site falls along the Carrying Place, the trade route used for centuries by the Wendat, Seneca, and Mississaugas of the Credit before any of the building’s later histories began.
The most recent layer added is a residential renovation by SUSA. The brief asked for a highly efficient, storage-rich home while keeping the openness of the loft. It also needed to support modern ways of living. SUSA’s founders Sara and Suza Ibrahim, responded by working with the heritage-protected fabric, where the shell wasn’t up for negotiation, so everything else had to work around it. The studio’s design treats the retained fabric – heritage-protected timber columns, exposed metal detailing, sections of original stonework – as features to celebrate. The columns become a moment of drama in the living area, framed by the city beyond them.
The single architectural move holding the apartment together is a continuous, curved armature that runs the full length of the loft, its form a nod to the conveyor belts that once carried sweets through the building on their way to packaging. Rather than distributing function room by room, the spine consolidates it: a fold-out bed, the kitchen, a pantry, laundry and storage are all built into the one intervention. Working efficiently within a small apartment, this gesture concentrates utility into a single element. The negative space that remains allows for light, movement, and the plan to stay open rather than resolve into a corridor of doors.
Against the industrial rigidity of the original shell, the interior insists on a softer, curving language. Travertine wraps the bathroom, white oak runs through the flooring and joinery, marble appears at the thresholds. None of it is walled off from the rest of the loft – the materials define where one zone ends and another begins through surface and texture rather than partitions. Artworks from the client’s own collection are placed as markers, also signalling a change of use when moving through the space.
Candy Loft doesn’t erase the building’s earlier lives so much as add to the list – confectionery plant, textile mill, site of labour history, one of Toronto’s first large-scale loft conversions, and now a respectful renovation.
Project credits
- Architecture and interior design – SUSA
- Architectural design – Suz and Sara Ibrahim
- Photography – Scott Norsworthy
- Interior styling – Porch Modern and Quasimodo
- Artwork styling – Maha Mustafa and Ibrahim Rashid
