Quote:
Originally Posted by MolsonExport
Tragic about that HBC flagship in Winnipeg closing. Lovely building. Eaton's giant flagship in downtown Montreal lay empty for years before being redeveloped into Simons et al.
banq
Eaton's had a fabulous art deco restaurant on the ninth floor. I ate there when I was much younger.
radio-canada.ca
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Great news yesterday about le 9ième Art Deco restaurant in the old Eaton: it will be restored to its former glory and re-opened later this year. The restoration work is already started. The restaurant, which can hold 500 guests, is the largest Art Deco space in Montreal and arguably one of the most beautiful in North America. Going by the official name Île-de-France, the restaurant opened in 1931 and was designed by Jacques Carlu, a French architect who also did the Trocadéro and the Palais du Chaillot in Paris, as well as The Carlu in Toronto.
It closed in 1999, along with the Eaton store. The same year, the Quebec Government classified it as historical, which means that nothing could be altered, including the furniture, the dishes and even the cutlery, everything was to be preserved. The space layed dormant for more than 20 years.
It was Lady Eaton, the widow of the heir to the business, who had been commissioned to build the restaurant. She had entrusted the design to the French architect Jacques Carlu, who was then working in the United States. It was also Jacques Carlu who designed the tea room in the Eaton's store in Toronto, in addition to the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, on the occasion of the 1937 World's Fair.
Carlu was inspired, for the design of the restaurant on the ninth floor, by the large dining rooms of the transatlantic liners, which marked the imagination of travelers at that time. It is said that he was particularly inspired by that of the Île-de-France, a ship built in 1927.
Le 9e restaurant in the former Eaton's store in Montreal will reopen
This iconic downtown establishment closed its doors at in the fall of 1999, following the bankruptcy of the Eaton's chain of stores.
If it took all this time to announce a reopening, it's because Ivanhoé Cambridge was looking for an ideal partner. We had to wait to find the right formula, says Ms. Desmarteau. It is a tenant who is going to settle and you have to make sure that he will respect, throughout the lease, all the criteria in terms of heritage.
But if the art deco current is clearly visible in the 9th, this work is particularly original, explains Georges Drolet. Carlu was able to bridge the gap between a fairly classic French tradition, which evokes French and European luxury, and a kind of more cosmopolitan avant-garde linked to the German avant-garde. and American. So, we have in this place a combination of the two which is really unique.
For example, the symmetry of the dining room refers to the classic volume of a basilica , while the floor of Ruboleum, an industrial material, presents a Cubist-inspired mosaic reminiscent of the carpets of the time made by painters such as Sonia Delaunay or Fernand Léger, explains Georges Drolet, who is also a historian of architecture.
Shortly after the establishment closed, the interior of the restaurant was classified as a heritage building by the Ministry of Culture and Communications.
Le 9e is almost art deco canon, says Dinu Bumbaru, policy director at Heritage Montreal. The organization, which had requested this classification, wishes that the integrity of the place be respected and that the public can enjoy it.
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