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Matt Davis, Allen Chan, and Anwar Mekhayech are the three co-founders of DesignAgency, a Toronto-based multidisciplinary studio they launched together in 1998 under the original name Precipice Studios.
Matt grew up in Mount Zion, Ontario, on a twelve-acre hobby farm where he developed an early affinity for building and working with tools. He studied landscape architecture at the University of Toronto, where he met Allen. Allen was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Toronto at age two, growing up in the west end of the city. He earned his undergraduate degree in landscape architecture and later completed a Master of Architecture at Columbia University, graduating in 2001. Anwar was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and raised in downtown Toronto near the Kensington Market and Chinatown neighbourhoods, where his family operated a restaurant called Kensington Kitchen on Harvard Street. He studied engineering at the University of Western Ontario before taking over his family's restaurant and pivoting toward design and entrepreneurship.
The three came together through the Toronto hospitality and restaurant scene of the late 1990s. Their first major collaborative project was SpaHa, a bistro they designed and opened on the ground floor of the University of Toronto's Graduate House, a building co-designed by Morphosis and Teeple Architects. The firm later hosted seasons of the HGTV Canada series Designer Guys before rebranding as DesignAgency in 2008 to reflect a broader, more holistic design philosophy.
Today DesignAgency operates studios in Toronto, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Barcelona, with a global team of more than 125 people across five principals. The firm's portfolio spans hospitality, entertainment, and resort design, with active projects including a resort in Portugal, a Montage property in the Bahamas, and work at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.
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Sponsors:
Caplan's Appliances
The Doors
Aquanta Pools
To connect with our sponsors, email me: jonathan@issuedforconstruction.ca
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