Milestones Grill + Bar, Kingston

Milestones, a restaurant brand owned by Cara, focuses on high quality food served in unique settings. The new restaurant is located on the ground floor of the Smith Robinson building, a handsome limestone Kingston landmark dating from 1841. This site became available after the S&R department store closed, leaving the building vacant for several years. The site comprises a beautifully articulated limestone street-facing building together with a 1950’s concrete addition. Stantec designs all Cara’s Milestones projects and was engaged by Cara to provide architectural and engineering design for this project.

Our first design response was to place equal value on both aspects of the building’s heritage – that from the 1840’s and also that from the 1950’s. We believed that the historical context cannot be conveniently sanitized by ignoring the inconvenient and ‘uncharming’ 1950’s addition. Our design strategy focused on several building elements to amplify the experience of both buildings.

The dining room takes advantage of the 600mm height difference between the two portions of the building by providing diners with privileged views into the bar area and also into the glass-fronted kitchen. Throughout the space we followed a deliberate strategy of leaving existing structure exposed and unadorned. This focused attention on the more intimate and finer scale of the various insertions such as the bar, dining rooms and waiting areas.

The rear wall of the limestone portion required significant rebuilding, so we took that opportunity to regularize the wall’s openings to align with the stately proportions of the Princess Street windows. In addition to creating a strong rhythm to the large bar room, this strategy also gave greater visibility to the arched concrete columns and beams from the 1950’s addition in the new dining room.

As the building is a significant part of Kingston’s heritage, we wanted to create a strong connection between the restaurant and the sidewalk. The loose bar seating is placed along the street windows creating high visibility and an immediate connection between both worlds. The partly sheltered patio is tucked under the west end of the building in a former access ramp.

In the early site reconnaissance, we noted that there were old timbers that were intended to be used to frame the penthouse. Some of these were reclaimed and subsequently used for tables in the restaurant. This strategy of re-use extended to other found elements within the space and aligned with our desire to fully express the existing building elements.

The restaurant has been an enormous success for Cara. The design provides customers with a connection to historic Kingston while dining in a clearly contemporary environment. The placement of the bar in its own room with views from the dining area allows the restaurant to cater to different customer needs while still establishing an overall experience that is relflective of the Milestones brand.

Our team also worked closely to reduce fossil fuel use by deploying a heat pump system as a heat pump loop can provide heating with low condenser water temperature and significantly smaller boiler. The heat pump system also provides flexibility of temperature control as it can provide either heating or cooling to any temperature zone regardless of the season and/or mode of the central plant. Furthermore, the heat pump system reduces energy consumption as during the fall and spring seasons, the load may be “recycled” from zone to zone without potential requirement to operate a cooling tower/fluid cooler and boiler. Restaurants tend to generate significant heat. To take advantage of this, the fresh air system includes an energy recovery system where it recovers energy from the exhaust system and introduces that energy recovered into the fresh air supply air to the building.