SaProximité

Discipline : Interior Design

Categories : Culture, Community, Sport & Wellness / Community: Community Center & Cultural Center : Grand Winner

Life centre is community lounge and café conceived within a repurposed church in Montreal, completed in 2025. The mandate was precise: honor the bones of a sacred building while transforming its communal heart into a contemporary gathering space for a new generation.

The design concept is Sacred Meets Social — and every element was chosen to hold both identities at once.

The arch appears throughout with full intentionality. Carved into the plaster bench bases, framing the passage into the game room, it marks every threshold the way sacred architecture always has — slowing entry, making crossing deliberate. Beyond the arched threshold, a curved wall of individually lit niches displays the community's objects: caps, books, garments. Each one elevated in its own pool of light. A reliquary reimagined.

Overhead in the store room, a true oculus is set into a hand-applied marbled ceiling, warm light descending into the room below. The Pantheon has used this gesture for two thousand years. In the main lounge, concentric elliptical plaster rings glow from within — a halo suspended above the congregation. Sacred geometry, spoken in a contemporary voice.

The monolithic plaster benches recall the pew: long, continuous, processional. Transformed with living greenery and cove lighting, they float rather than anchor. The game room is the most unexpected space and the most honest. Medieval church grounds always housed play alongside worship. The pool table beneath the marbled oculus is not a departure from the sacred. It is a return to what community has always meant.

The café bar bears ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions in its plaster face — history worn smooth by daily use. Coffee served against centuries. Nothing from the past was erased. It was absorbed, recontextualized, and made present again.

That is the thesis of the entire project. The earliest expressions of Christian community were not architectural — they were relational. People gathered in homes, around tables, in courtyards. The cathedral came later. The community came first.

Life Centre reaches past the institution to something older — the simple act of people choosing to be together. The circular banquette invites it. The café bar enables it. The halo ceiling consecrates it. The game room celebrates it. And the open arms of the space ensure that everyone — without exception — is welcome at the table.

No hierarchy. No exclusion. No architecture of privilege. In a city as diverse as Montreal, that is not a small gesture. It is a design position.

Sacred and social were never opposites. Neither were sacred and inclusive. This project is the proof.

The project in images