When Govan Brown partnered with Cactus Club Cafe in 2013 to oversee the build out of their first Edmonton location, who would have known that it would be just a taste of the fruitful partnership that would come?
Having successfully assisted the premium casual restaurant chain expand into Edmonton, Govan Brown was then entrusted with Cactus Club’s entrée into the Ontario market, managing the construction of their flagship Toronto restaurant in the heart of the city’s Financial District. And now, more than a decade after that initial project, Govan Brown and Cactus Club’s recently completed third project might just take the cake.
After acquiring 15,500sf of space in the heart of Toronto’s Midtown district in 2018, Cactus Club’s plans for a new location that would serve the North York community were put on hold due to the pandemic. During this time, Govan Brown continued to build on its experience and solidify its expertise in hospitality, delivering spaces for clients like Eataly and formally establishing a Retail & Hospitality division that offers sector expertise in the nuanced typology of these builds. And with Cactus Club’s team also undergoing changes of their own, this new location offered the perfect opportunity to continue the recipe for success.
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
A significant challenge the project team had to contend with throughout the duration of construction was the restaurant’s unique location. While restaurants typically opt for street-level footprints, Cactus Club’s Midtown space is located on the second floor of the Yonge Sheppard Centre, an indoor shopping and commercial development. With the restaurant chain taking over the lease of a daycare that was sandwiched between a bank retail branch and corporate offices, the Govan Brown project team first needed to make the inhospitable hospitable and transform the original space into one fit for a commercial grade restaurant.
“A lot of restauranteurs find spaces that aren’t necessarily designed for restaurants, and it’s our job to help them accommodate their design into the space they’ve chosen,” says Tyler Brown, Govan Brown’s director of retail and hospitality. “In an office build, you could have around 10 penetrations through a slab. In a restaurant, you can have over 100. That’s where understanding things like waterproofing details and under-slab rough-ins become critical because access below the slab becomes very limited after handover.”
Adding to the complexity was the client’s preference for a larger-than-normal kitchen over a larger seating area, which helps them get quality food to patrons quickly. But this also meant that a greater amount of structural steel, mechanical units, and kitchen equipment needed to be transported to the development’s second floor to install the infrastructure needed for the kitchen as well as the all-season, cantilevered patio. Understanding the number of eyes that were on the project—both literal, given the bustling Yonge and Sheppard intersection and the site’s visibility, and figurative, with the client heavily promoting the new location on social media—the Govan Brown project team invested heavily into devising a logistics and communication plan. The plan outlined a proactive approach to ensure the ongoing operations at the Yonge Sheppard Centre and the impact to neighbouring tenants and the City were as unimpeded as possible.
PROJECT DETAILS
Location: Toronto, Canada
Size: 15,500sf
Client: Cactus Club Cafe
Designer: K Paul Architects/Jeffrey Beers International
Project Manager: Integrity Project Consulting
Landlord: RioCan REIT
Mechanical Engineer: The Aquila Group
Electrical Engineer: MCW Hemisphere Ltd.
Sector: Hospitality
WHAT IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO
Because Govan Brown was engaged for preconstruction services in 2023, the project team worked for more than half a year to meet the client’s project budget, which had been solidified pre-COVID. Conducting value engineering exercises that would ultimately hit the bullseye, the Govan Brown team then had to contend with a change in designer midway through construction. Bringing Jeffrey Beers International on as designer helped Cactus Club solidify their brand within the space, with their design significantly impacting both the lighting and millwork packages.
“Cactus Club has a strong understanding of their brand. It goes beyond the food and includes a huge emphasis on the space,” Brown notes. And that’s where the Cactus Club team was essential. Their thorough understanding of construction meant that they could act like an in-house QA/QC team, one whose eyes were meticulously attuned to their brand standards. As much as they were the client and owner, Cactus Club was looking to be as much a value-additive partner as Govan Brown was. “The relationship was not contractor and owner,” says Brown. “It was a partnership with a common goal: open a restaurant.”
In August 2024, Cactus Club Cafe Yonge and Sheppard had its grand opening, and members from the Govan Brown project team were in attendance, getting a shout out for their successful delivery of the space. As opposed to a corporate office, a hospitality project is “something that you can go
back to, show off, and walk other clients through. You’re able to go back and enjoy the fruits of your labour,” Brown says. That’s the cherry on top.
