Canada’s fashion elite look back at the Room, a unique part of Hudson’s Bay history

The St. Regis Room at the Simpsons department store in Toronto is seen in this 1961 handout photo from the Hudson's Bay Company Archives held at the Archives of Manitoba. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout - Hudson's Bay Company Archives, Archives of Manitoba (Mandatory Credit)

TORONTO — On a warm day in the middle of a November cold snap, Nicholas Mellamphy and Helen Krispis arrived at the former Hudson’s Bay flagship store in Toronto clad completely in black.

The outfits were a sartorial statement; a fitting one given the sombre nature of their visit.

The pair were on their way to the Room, a third-floor boutique HBC ran for the wealthiest and chicest echelons of society to shop for designer clothing fresh from the runway.

They hadn’t been back since the department store dramatically crumbled earlier this year, shuttering every location just in time for summer and turning the Room — and their legacy — into a footnote in the story of how Canada’s oldest company rose and fell.

Their return was for a photo shoot, but it was also a way to close a chapter of their careers and bear witness to a gem in the HBC empire that didn’t get its due when the retailer collapsed with $1.1 billion in debt and no hope of finding a saviour.

“It’s like a clearing of the grave,” said Mellamphy, the Room’s former creative director and vice-president, as he wandered the Yonge and Queen street space that once felt like a second home. “It’s kind of like we’ve come back, and now we can move on.”

The bones of what he and Krispis, the Room’s director of visual presentation, helped build were still there — row upon row of decor, emptied dressing rooms, the pricey carpet so big it filled a room and had to be glued down and the most fashionable throne in the city: a fuchsia bathroom.

But gone were the racks of opulent clothing, the former supermodels who made people lust for their garments and the customers who ate them up, even though they cost four figures.

That was what made the Room the closest thing the country had to New York or European boutiques.

Visiting felt like being part of an exclusive club, where staff would hand-pick garments for you from Paris, help you rub shoulders with the biggest names in fashion and invite you to parties that were the envy of anyone in Toronto.

The space was a reimagination of the St. Regis Room, a luxury fashion business started in 1937 as a way for Simpsons, the former department store taken over by HBC in the late 1970s, to sell high-end clothing.

Ads it ran in the Toronto Daily Star that September some 90 years ago show it marketed itself as the place for “women of all ages, from debs to dowagers” to find dresses, suits, hats and “sports costumes” befitting Paris, London, Vienna and New York.

While it continued to exist long after the HBC takeover, many in fashion agreed it was due for a modern renaissance.

The architect of its revitalization was Bonnie Brooks, a fashion magazine editor-turned-retail miracle maker who spent time at Holt Renfrew and Hong Kong department store Lane Crawford before taking the helm of Hudson’s Bay in 2008 at the behest of HBC governor and New York real estate tycoon Richard Baker.

During her tenure, Brooks worked to push the department store upmarket. She culled underperforming lines from HBC racks, brought celebrities including David Beckham and Kim Kardashian to her stores and championed the iconic red Olympic mittens HBC designed for Team Canada that became an instant success during the 2010 Vancouver Games and are still a fixture on resale websites.

She also poached talent: Fashion magazine reported that its former art director was lured away to turn HBC’s newspaper flyers into glossy adverts, while ’80s models Donna DeMarco and Jean Fleming took roles as personal shoppers.

But one of her biggest wins was the Room, a fashion mecca that sold the poshest shoppers $7,000 dresses in between sips of champagne.

Its revitalization was just a burgeoning idea when Mellamphy managed to score a meeting with Brooks in 2009.

“When she walked into the boardroom to meet ... she was like, ‘Have you ever heard of the Room?’” recalled Mellamphy. “I was like ‘Oh yeah,’ and pulled out this kind of package for her.”

The package was several pages that painted a resplendent vision of what the Room could be — a boutique catering to the city’s “socialites and glamazons” with clothing from the likes of Balmain, Celine, Jay Mandel and Giambattista Valli.

Brooks, who did not respond to a request for comment for this story, had been harbouring the same idea and wanted Mellamphy to put it to the test.

“She was like, ‘OK, go to Europe. See what you can get, and if we can get what we need, we’ll make it happen,’” remembers Mellamphy.

The global financial crisis was still unfolding in 2009, so his budget was limited, and he also had to convince designers and customers alike that HBC could be cool.

Some fashion houses wanted to wait and see how his experiment went before sending him garments. Others who offered pieces faced threats from rival retailers prepared to cut off the designer if it continued selling to the Room because they were worried the new rival would swoop in and steal their brands.

Mellamphy coped by procuring looks from emerging designers like Christopher Kane, Erdem and Charlotte Olympia.

“People thought, ‘Oh God, you were so forward, you were so ahead of your time,’ but really one of the reasons I bought those was because we had roadblocks put in our way,” he said.

To get shoppers into the Room, Brooks gave out gift certificates to high-profile people and hosted luncheons and dinners that became the city’s most coveted invitations, recalls her friend and the host of “FashionTelevision” for 27 years, Jeanne Beker.

“They were spending a fortune, which I guess you sort of had to do, especially in those circles, to really have an impact,” Beker said of HBC’s management.

One of the most expensive moves was transforming the Room into a ritzy enclave befitting the clothing. For that task, Brooks hired Yabu Pushelberg — the design firm behind the Park Hyatt hotels in Shenzen and Bangkok, the Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman stores in New York and even Team Canada’s Olympic house at the Rio Games.

While the firm created the Room’s canvas, it was Brooks who made it a masterpiece.

“She’s able to, without any coercion or hard sell, attract and inspire. That’s one of her greatest talents,” cofounder George Yabu told the Toronto Star, when construction was underway. “She gets you excited, and you want to make it work for her as much as for herself.”

Her formula worked. Slowly but surely, the local rich, movie stars and even members of royal families started flocking. They noticed what the Room had to offer was just as grand as anything they’d find abroad.

“They would say, ‘I can’t believe this is in Toronto,’” Mellamphy recalled.

Part of the wow factor came from displays Helen Krispis, a former marketing director at Canadian fashion brand Pink Tartan, made at the Toronto flagship and at a Room outpost that opened in Vancouver in 2011.

Krispis turned the spaces into a garden replete with bright butterflies to show off a collection from Roksanda and covered every inch of the space’s entry way with silver balloons to celebrate Mary Katrantzou. Other displays recreated walks in the fall leaves at Hyde Park and festooned the Room in roses that hung from the ceiling and gold that covered the walls and floors.

“It felt like a dream,” Krispis said of the opportunity she had to let her imagination run wild.

The opulence belied fractures Mellamphy noticed in the years after HBC bought longtime acquisition target and U.S. rival Saks Fifth Avenue for US$2.9 billion in 2013.

At the time, executives told media the move was meant to spark growth from a cross-border customer base, but for Mellamphy, it was a turning point. The Room was moved from the third-floor corner space it had occupied for 78 years to the west side of the building and its resources dwindled.

“I remember them cutting my budgets and I’m going, ‘I don’t understand why you’re cutting our budget. We’ve had growth continually,’” he recalled.

He left the business in 2016, not long after Brooks’ departure, in part because he felt the Room became “an afterthought” when Saks was purchased.

That the two brands were vying for a niche customer from opposite ends of the same building didn’t help.

“I’m sure the pressure was on very often, and a lot of the clothing was fabulous, but how well did it really do?” Beker said. “I don’t know if a lot of that really high-end stuff flew out of there or not.”

Yet the Room always had an allure and by 2024, Mellamphy was hooked again. He rejoined last February to chart another rebound from the health crisis that temporarily closed stores but says he was met with additional challenges.

“I knew that it was tight,” he said of the company’s financials, “but I don’t think it was until December when I kind of thought, ‘OK, something is not right.’”

By then, shoppers and staff were accustomed to HBC’s broken escalators, temperamental air conditioning systems and other faltering store infrastructure.

People were shopping in new ways and at new places and a succession of executives that didn’t seem to have Brooks’ touch.

“All you had to do was go into a Bay store on a Saturday afternoon and see how empty it was so much of the time and how hard it was to get the right service there so much of the time,” Beker said. “The last few years, I was expecting it to shut down at any minute.”

Still, Krispis never imagined she’d see the fall of the retailer because the company had always managed to chug along and she was so deep into plans for the Room’s next season.

“When you’re thinking about what the next project is, you’re not really thinking about all those other little details,” she said.

She was shocked when she learned along with HBC’s 9,364 staff about the creditor protection case in March but thought the retailer would be able to find a Hail Mary.

“There’s still a part of me that feels it’s not 100 per cent over,” she said of HBC.

Mellamphy felt similarly.

“When you work for a company that’s been around for 355 years ... you always think they’re going to be able to overcome their challenges because they always have,” he said.

Up until his last day — May 15 — he thought it would find a lifeline, but no one stepped forward to fund the business. HBC resorted to selling its name, trademarks and stripes to Canadian Tire for $30 million and putting its prized leases up for sale.

In its dying days, customers rifled through racks of designer dresses from the Room that were steeply marked down. Also on offer were massive portraits of models that had adorned dressing room walls, china from which customers dined and the props Krispis used to create displays.

“It was like going through a breakup or something like that because you’ve put so much into building something and now you are taking those pieces away,” Krispis said.

Beker didn’t have the heart to visit. She preferred to “remember it in its heyday, when I had my own little department at the top of the escalator, when I was going there to do all these glamorous little interviews and covering all these glamorous little events.”

It was where she interviewed designer Oscar de la Renta for the last time, feted major names like hat designer Philip Treacy, and tried on clothing from just about every big-name label.

A wisp of that glamour returned in September when “Project Runway Canada” used the Room for its season finale. In a “full-circle moment,” Beker, a judge on the show, was given a dressing room she knew well.

“It was certainly sad. A lot of feelings, a lot of thoughts came rushing back,” she said.

Mellamphy and Krispis felt the same on their visit, when landlord Cadillac Fairview was drywalling other floors and fixing escalators so the space could be reopened as a link to the adjacent Eaton Centre and underground PATH system.

They ran their fingers over the giant reception desk Peter Triantos had painted a mesmerizing black and white pattern and furniture HBC left behind, tagged with fluorescent liquidation prices.

They passed a wall decal with the Carrie Bradshaw quote “I like my money right where I can see it ... hanging in my closet” that someone had partly removed and they posed for one last photo in front of the iconic “The Room” sign, now missing the “T” and the “R.”

Then, they stepped onto the elevator and said goodbye as the doors closed, whisking them back to life without the Room.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 22, 2025.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press