Sep 10, 2010

Retail Therapy: Exit through the Drake General Store gift shopBy Nathalie AtkinsonNews.NationalPost.com

Toronto, Canada — The Drake General Store might stock a bit of Canadiana, but there are no CN Tower snow globes or Blue Jays keychains, not even tongue in cheek. For Hogtown visitors and residents alike, DGS turns the idea of the typical hotel gift shop on its head.

Originally launched two years ago as an inspired annex to Parkdale’s creative hub, artist hangout and oh yes actual hotel The Drake, one that would combine curated flea market scores with quirky corner-store fare, the general store is now a mini-chain. It opened its third canny neighborhood location (the second is in Rosedale) this summer downtown, in the shadow of the new Thompson Toronto and King West’s hip strip.

Tucked under a purple neon cross (a riff on Europe’s traditional green pharmacy cross symbol), what most distinguishes this latest location from its siblings is a back section devoted to DGS curators Joyce Lo and Carlo Colacci’s Shared line of simple, well-cut and feel-good t-shirts (both literally and figuratively: soft organic Supima cotton, and fifty percent of profits from each tee gets donated to local charities). And there’s more apparel in general — from Cheap Monday shirts to unwaxed Japanese Levi’s based on a 1947 original model.

A quarter of the merchandise in this cabinet of curiosities is vintage, thrifted finds or antiques and all the fixtures are for sale – from an old adding machine, wall-mounted grain scale to a metal Lyon desk ($1200). There are treasures among the new and used books, such as 1970’s Cooking for Caravaners paperback or a slew of early 1980s Playboys, mixed in with cookery tomes from Momofuku and true one-off kitchen kitsch: the graduation project of a Brighton Art School student that consists of a set of handpainted Harrow Ladies luncheon plates ($300 for 5). Come party time, there are disco-ball piñatas.

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