It\u2019s a good thing Philippe Beauparlant\u2019s pain au chocolat is slow in arriving. At 15 minutes, he\u2019s covered only his studies in industrial design at Humber College, his subsequent job working under the award-winning Mark M\u00fcller at Toronto\u2019s Nienkamper, and why he quit.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was 27 when I left,\u201d he says with a smile, \u201cand at 27 you know enough but you also know nothing. \u2026 I had huge ambitions.\u201d<\/p>\n
When designing bespoke furniture didn\u2019t take off, he took a job at a millwork company. There, he realized that while people might not pay thousands for a chair or a custom credenza, \u201cthey\u2019re going to spend a ton of money on kitchen cabinets,\u201d so his side hustle, Beauparlant Design, was born. <\/p>\n
(Still no pastry at the table, and this author is feeling guilty diving into his avocado toast.)<\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Philippe Beauparlant.Valerie Wilcox\/Valerie Wilcox<\/p>\n After a short stint in project management and the birth of his first child in 2007, Mr. Beauparlant took the leap and made custom kitchens a full-time gig. And it worked. However, this was during the \u201cGluckstein era\u201d and he found himself designing cabinets with \u201ctraditional face frames, lots of mouldings. \u2026 It was 50 shades of beige,\u201d he says with a laugh.<\/p>\n In 2011, Mr. Beauparlant\u2019s own Leslieville kitchen \u2013 definitely not beige \u2013 won top prize in the Design with Liebherr contest. This allowed Mr. Beauparlant to hire a few people and expanded permanently into whole-house interiors. A few years later, the classic story of the creative becoming the administrator reared its ugly head, and Mr. Beauparlant\u2019s health suffered.<\/p>\n (And now that his pastry has finally arrived and he takes a bite, we\u2019ll skip ahead to the pivot-point in his life.)<\/p>\n As Beauparlant Design reached the end of its life, the COVID-19 pandemic was also winding down. Around this time, Mr. Beauparlant\u2019s family of four entered an Airbnb contest to live in a house in Sicily for a year. While they didn\u2019t win, the idea stayed with them, \u201cand we moved there for 10 months,\u201d Mr. Beauparlant says while brushing crumbs off his shirt. \u201cNow it is a marker in life. We always say, \u2018Was this before or after Sicily?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n As one might imagine, even with a gruelling schedule of \u201ccreative\u201d home-schooling, shopping for local produce and the midday riposo, seeds that were planted a long time ago grew in Mr. Beauparlant. \u201cWhen I was at Nienkamper, I can look back at journals, ideas I was writing down, and this idea of doing some kind of development was always in the back of my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n Things had changed in Toronto, too, from the time he and his wife had purchased a laneway property in the Beaches neighbourhood in 2002 with the intent of developing it (which never happened) vis-\u00e0-vis the laneway suite bylaw amendment in 2018, the garden suite amendment in 2022, and the sixplex \u201cas-of-right\u201d in nine of Toronto\u2019s 25 wards. <\/p>\n (He\u2019s taken two bites; I\u2019m finished.)<\/p>\n So, once again, Mr. Beauparlant took a leap of faith and created Home 05: Instrument for Living. But, \u201cit has to align with the things that are important to me,\u201d he says pensively. \u201cIt can\u2019t just be a transactional thing, so the cheapest [product] built for the highest return; there has to be a balance. And I realized I have expensive tastes \u2026 maybe not the most expensive materials, but the way that they\u2019re handled.\u201d<\/p>\n