IN Toronto magazine

ARCHITECTURE

Designer and Fashion Cares co-founder Rick Mugford is an architect with an eye for unusual, telling detail

Rick Mugford finds a rhinestone bracelet on the office floor that he’s going to wear until someone claims it. The look is a little flashy for the Wellington Street offices of Quadrangle Architects, where rows upon rows of designers and technical people sit quietly enraptured in front of their computer screens, but today Mugford has paired his argyle sweater with salmon-coloured pants, so why not?

“The sensibility about architecture and the thinking that’s involved... I definitely belong here,” says Mugford. “The sociological aspect of it… maybe not. Coming from my background, I’m a little unusual. This kind of turtleneck-wearing, tweed-wearing thoughtful person who lives on a houseboat... that’s not me.”

Of all the fields of design, architecture is probably the most solemn. The huge costs of construction are real whimsy-killers for everyone but celebrity starchitects. And while a fashionista may not mind if a show-stopping dress crumbles after a season or two, the not-falling-apart of buildings is taken rather more seriously. Bean counters and engineers overrule visionaries, which anyone taking a close look at this town can tell you.

“To see something solid made out of the lines I’ve drawn, it sends me over the moon.”

With his floppy silver hair and plastic-rimmed glasses, Mugford is hardly flamboyant. At 50, he’s definitely more Stephen Fry than Nathan Lane. But his unorthodox fashion-inspired path to the Quadrangle offices — where he’s worked since 2005, except for a two-year stint at Zeidler Partnership Architects — has given him a much different way of looking at the built environment than his peers. His work with Caroline Robbie on the interior of Diamond Schmitt’s outwardly suburban-looking Corus building on Queens Quay has turned heads for its extraordinary flexibility and its balance between playfulness and sophistication. The part of a downtown Markham mega-project he was involved with sold out in four hours. (Construction on several buildings he worked on for Zeidler, including the sleek Al-Rajhi residential tower in Jeddah, remain to be built.) As perverse as it sounds in such a visual profession, it’s Mugford’s attention to the look of things that’s made him in demand. He and Robbie will strut their stuff at this year’s IDS as one of six teams in How Do You Live?, a two-storey demonstration condo onsite at the big design fair.  

“I’m constantly being consulted about what I think of the overall design, the colour combinations, the aesthetic. I’m not the guy they’re coming to to ask how the rain screen will go on the building,” says Mugford, laughing.

For Mugford, who didn’t go to architecture school until he was 38, life experience is key. His time working in fashion and interior design — perhaps even his time in the world of literature, taking photos for the International Festival of Authors — has shaped his idea of what makes a great building. As co-founder of Fashion Cares, he’s also seen the way unlikely alliances can form to solve a problem, and how a solution can look good even when the problem is a terrible one.
 

Modern Toronto style was born in the early 1980s, when the walls between fashion, music and art were permeable, especially for the city’s newly energized gay community. As a boy, Mugford drew house plans for fun, but he ended up studying fashion at George Brown. He soon launched a women’s clothing line with a friend; their first collection sold to Lipton’s, a national chain at the time. When his business partner moved to Milan (“She was more interested in a jet-setty life”) he became a buyer, working for Yorkville’s Over the Rainbow when the store defined Toronto youth-oriented fashion, and for Wow on Queen West, when Queen West was in full parachute-pants-wearing myth-making mode.

By the mid-1980s, when HIV/AIDS was still considered “the gay cancer,” Mugford and his Wow boss, fashion maven Syd Beder, decided they had to do something. They contacted the London team who had come up with the Fashion Cares fundraising concept and got permission to use the name for their own event.

 “HIV/AIDS was very prominent in the news. I had a lot of friends I thought might be affected,” says Beder, who now owns Lileo in the Distillery District. “Rick was my opposite and my entrée into the gay community. The two of us could bring together our resources from both communities.”

Early hysteria about the disease made it hard to attract funding or interest. After they confirmed the venue, the old Diamond Club (now the Phoenix Concert Theatre), Mugford says they were told they couldn’t use the word AIDS on any of the publicity materials. As Fashion Cares got bigger over the next couple of years, Mugford lost his patience for it. “To be perfectly frank, I was frustrated with the lack of charity in people’s hearts. People were asking for receipts for their time — I’m just glad we were able to raise money for the AIDS Committee of Toronto.”

Mugford then became visual presentation manager at Bloor Street’s Emporio Armani. If his career to that point had taught him to be creative and personable, he was now expected to be precise. He was. Sale signs were verboten. Nobody except Mugford was allowed to touch so much as a mannequin. “I got to the point where I thought my bosses weren’t paying attention and then I’d do something they didn’t like and I’d quickly find out they were paying attention.”

But retail in Canada is not the same career track as retail in the US and Mugford, as he got older, didn’t want to be what he calls, “that guy working in a store, even if it was a nice store.” His last foray in retail, at Budd Sugarman’s famed Hazelton House on Davenport, was pivotal, applying the minimalist aesthetic he had been refining at Armani to interior design.

Although Mugford had always been fascinated by architecture, he had also been intimidated. His growing work and social circles slowly changed his perspective. “I met a lot of architects and realized they weren’t smarter than me.” Although architecture school was “murder” and “lots of money,” Mugford’s understated designs won him good grades and awards, if not the admiration of his younger flashier peers. He chose Quadrangle because the work was solid and the work/life balance seemed more reasonable than at hotshot “puppy mill” firms. Early on, he and Quadrangle senior designer Caroline Robbie went on a business trip to Atlanta together. They found an ally in each other.

“He revolutionized the Corus project,” says Robbie. “He has an eye for detail, but also, and I hesitate to say this because of how the word is used, common sense. He gets to the point very quickly.”

The interior spaces for the University of Toronto’s Centre for Jewish Studies, as well as re-imagining the schoolhouse at 36 Hazelton into high-end condos are what’s on Mugford’s mind right now. He gets as excited about a residential gate as he gets about a tower — if it’s the right gate. “To see something solid made out of the lines I’ve drawn, it sends me over the moon.”

In a relationship for 25 years (his partner works at the International Festival of Authors, accounting for Mugford’s role as festival photographer for more than 17 years), he’s less open about his private life than his opinions about architecture. He does talk about their home, walking distance from Quadrangle, and how it has too much stuff in it. Among his prized art possessions is a Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture hidden away in a drawer so it doesn’t get broken. In the fall, he took it out for a Chatelaine magazine photo shoot and then put it away again, only to be told that Chatelaine was coming back for another round.

“The cleaning lady must have been wondering what I was up to,” he laughs, the rhinestone bracelet still jangling. “But I really didn’t know what to do with it.”

IDS 12 Thu, Jan 26-29. Metro Convention Centre. 255 Front St W. interiordesignshow.com.