SALLY KASSAR — PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, OAAArchitecture
shaped by memory.
Designed for
how you live.
Toronto-based, OAA-licensed architecture and interior design studio. Founded on the belief that the spaces we inhabit every day are the ones that matter most.
ORIGINI grew up in a house that my grandfather commissioned in Baghdad — a multi-generational home designed by an architect and built with the intention of lasting across generations. Two households, two levels, two separate entrances, a shared courtyard connecting them. My grandparents lived below; my parents, my brother, and I above. A basket on a rope moved between floors when we didn't want to make the trip.
The living room was clad in solid wood panelling. The kitchen was built around a breakfast table large enough for the whole family. There was a built-in fish tank in the family room, a walkout terrace off the upper kitchen, natural light through every room. Distinct spaces with distinct purposes — not open plans, but a sequence of considered rooms, each one calibrated to how people actually live together. It was a home built for family, for entertaining, for the long term.
I left that house when I was ten years old. Decades later, I can still describe every room in detail. That is what well-designed architecture does. It embeds itself. It shapes how you move, how you gather, how you remember the time you spent inside it. Most people experience this — in a restaurant they keep returning to, a café that feels exactly right — without ever being able to name what's causing it. I became an architect because I wanted to understand exactly why — and to build that feeling intentionally, for the people I work with.
That house in Baghdad is still the benchmark.
PHILOSOPHYThe name is deliberate. Architecture Riot works with precision and restraint — materials chosen for durability and tactile quality, spaces that are distinct, light and craft considered at every turn. That point of view is placed entirely in service of the person commissioning the work. Layouts are figured out from use, not imposed over it. Every project is built from the client's life upward. That's the riot.
The spaces we inhabit every day shape how we feel, how we connect, how we move through the world. Most people sense this without being able to name it. Architecture Riot works at the scale of residential and retail because these are the spaces that have the most direct and sustained impact on the people who use them. A home is where life happens — not occasionally, but every day, across years and decades. A well-executed retail environment becomes part of the fabric of a neighbourhood. The scale is human. The stakes are real.
Every project begins with a close study of the people behind the brief. How a family moves through its mornings - that’s research. What entertaining means to a particular household. How a brand's identity translates into a physical experience someone feels before they can articulate it. The work is not about imposing a style — it is about learning enough about a client to design something that could only belong to them.
The clients who energize this studio most are the ones who arrive with a clear sense of who they are and a willingness to be ambitious about what the project can become. The best work happens when the client functions as a collaborator — when their life, their personality, and their values are the raw material the architecture is built from.
STUDIOArchitecture Riot is a Toronto-based, OAA-licensed architecture and interior design studio founded and led by Sally Kassar. With fifteen years of industry experience and nearly five years as an independent practice, the studio has built a body of work recognized by Architectural Digest, Designlines, Nuvo Magazine, Interior Design Magazine, The Architect's Newspaper, AN Interior, Leibal, and The Globe and Mail — and named a 2026 Best in Design Awards Finalist for Emerging Talent by Azure and Designlines.
Sally holds a Master of Architecture from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. She is a licensed member of the Ontario Association of Architects and leads every project from first concept through to construction completion.
The studio takes on new builds, renovations, additions, and retail fit-outs in Toronto, across the Greater Toronto Area, and beyond. Every project is managed as a single, continuous engagement — one studio, accountable for the full scope of the work.
COLLABORATORS
Ava Nourbaran
Fadi Salib
Javier Huerta
LOCATION
Architecture Riot Inc.
East Room, 68 Claremont Street
Toronto, ON M6J 2M5
CONTACT
info@architectureriot.com
Toronto · GTA · Beyond