Three thousand live plants, a wall of Eramosa limestone, and enough reclaimed elm to suggest a forest rather than a hotel lobby — these were the choices Rockwell Group made when they transformed the former Thompson Hotel Toronto into 1 Hotel Toronto in 2021, establishing Canada's first outpost of SH Hotels & Resorts' sustainability-driven brand. The ten-floor, 112-room building at 550 Wellington Street West in King West Village was already a neighbourhood anchor; what changed was its soul, reoriented entirely around biophilic principles and the ecological character of the Ontario landscape. The rooms carry this ethos through to the upper floors, where live-edge wood bed frames and woven rattan pendants sit against wide-plank oak flooring and sheer linen drapes that diffuse the city light into something softer. Leather poufs, raw log side tables, and chunky cable-knit throws give the spaces the atmosphere of a well-considered cabin rather than a conventional hotel room. Below, the restaurant Kitchen Toronto grounds its dining room in studded leather pendant lights and walnut communal tables framed by steel-and-glass partitions, while the rooftop pool frames the CN Tower and downtown skyline with an unguarded directness that feels genuinely earned. The design throughout resists the usual hospitality polish in favour of texture, materiality, and a quiet argument that luxury and ecological accountability need not pull in opposite directions.

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