he greystone façade of a five-storey, 150-year-old building in Old Montreal has been carefully maintained and enhanced for the edifice?s new life as the sole physical outlet for a global online high fashion retailer. Photo: Dominik Hodel for SSENSE
PROJECT SSense Montréal
ARCHITECTS David Chipperfield Architects (design architect) with Aedifica (local architect)
When you call the SSENSE phone number, the machine says, ?For service in English, please press one;? then something unintelligible to me, then ?Pour le service en français, faites le trois.? I am told that the unintelligible part translates to ?For service in Mandarin, please press two.? Then you get lost in the usual maze of extensions and selections. Welcome to the world of modern high-fashion retailing. Of course, the reality of that world exists online, and the SSENSE website immerses you in it completely. It showcases huge arrays of apparel and accessories, all of it beautiful and/or surprising. Some of it is by familiar houses, more by designers whose names you don?t yet know.  The site claims 76 million monthly page views.
SSENSE (pronounced ?essence?) is a Montreal-based distributor of high-end fashion. The company was founded in 2003 by brothers Rami, Firas, and Bassel Atallah. Revenues are now reported to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They have just one brick-and-mortar (or, rather, stone-and-concrete) outlet. It sits just below the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Vieux-Montréal, behind the exu...