River Crossing

A chic Queen Street W boutique designed to evoke the flow of a river

Fashion, home and art boutique River Crossing is a haven of high design. The store opened its doors in May of this year and features over 40 designer and slow fashion brands, as well as a variety of international homeware products and artworks. Located on the northside of Queen Street W, it’s the perfect scene for an elevated shopping day—sitting alongside the Anne Sportun flagship jewelry store and Canadian footwear brand Maguire, and only minutes away from Trinity Bellwoods Park. 

River Crossing is the first venture by owner Leah Mersky—previously a working artist, trained in sculpture at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York, with experience in wholesale fashion and the charitable sector. Deeply interested in sourcing and curating high quality products, Mersky says of her process: “I love traveling and meeting amazing creators and designers in their own environment and bringing a small piece of their world back to our store.”

Open Gallery Modal

And the boutique’s interior reflects this sentiment. Designed by Vancouver-based interior design duo Oliva Bull and Daniel Garrod, the 125 square-metre space is not your typical retail store. Instead, it boasts a refreshing mix of gallery-like shelving and displays—featuring red oak custom millwork by Daniel Cairns of Studio Archive—and a warm residential feel, with a slew of textures from cork tabletops and brushed stainless steel racking to the natural linen and muslin fabrics of the handpicked textile objects. Originally featuring one long, narrow floor plan, the new layout was reimagined into three discrete spaces that flow forward from the front door to the back wall— “as a river flows along its banks”.  

“The meandering path through the shop was achieved with a natural material palette in tandem with warm lighting to create a calm environment more akin to a living room than a shopping mall,” says Bull.

Thanks to this thoughtful redesign, River Crossing’s elegant interior fosters a warm and intimate shopping experience—and when looking for stylish design objects, you won’t have to look far to imagine your stylish design life.

“It was incredibly important to me to create an inviting place that people want to spend time in. River Crossing brings together different aesthetics, and we wanted to create a backdrop that wouldn’t compete with the merchandise, while still being incredibly beautiful itself,” explains Mersky.