Why Moscow Interior Design Is Ahead of Toronto
Four years ago I moved to Toronto and experienced a real culture shock.
Imagine walking into a luxury high-rise in downtown Toronto, apartments worth millions of dollars, and finding that the lobby looks worse than a Soviet-era apartment building outside Moscow.
I’m not exaggerating.
We worked on an ambitious project in one of the most prestigious condominiums in the city. I looked up at the lobby ceiling and was genuinely shocked. The plastering was so poor it looked like it had been done blindfolded. In Russia, a crew would have been fired on the spot for work like that. Here, it’s considered perfectly acceptable.
Why?
After thinking about it for a long time, I realized it’s not that people don’t care.
It’s that the system works differently. There are two powerful reasons why Moscow has pulled so far ahead in interior design.
The first reason is contrast
Unlike Canada, which has a large and relatively equal middle class, Moscow has an enormous gap between wealthy and everyone else. Affluent Muscovites, much like clients in Dubai, want only the best: top designers, premium European materials, cutting-edge finishes and lighting. Their high standards push designers and builders to operate at the absolute limit of their abilities. It’s a demanding environment, but that’s exactly what produces true professionals and exceptional results.
The second reason is the building industry itself
If apartments in Moscow are sold as bare concrete shells. In Toronto, you buy a home that already has floors, painted walls, and a kitchen. You move your furniture in and live with someone else’s renovation. You can change it, but it’s expensive and disruptive, so most people don’t. In Moscow, every single buyer must hire their own contractors and designer, and pay them directly out of their own pocket. When it’s your own money going to specific people, you have every right to demand perfection.
Now multiply that across thousands of apartments being renovated simultaneously. It functions like one enormous training ground. Designers and builders are constantly practicing, competing, learning, and pushing each other to improve.
When we opened our studio in Toronto, we faced a choice: adapt to the local standard or maintain the European level of design we had built our reputation on. We chose to keep our standards. That decision means a smaller pool of potential clients, and we knew that going in. But those clients share our belief that design done at the highest level is always worth it.