Ministry of Education

The Ministry of Education office in Milton is a 2,400 sf interior office retrofit that houses work spaces, communal areas and meeting spaces for the Licensing & Compliance Child Care Quality Assurance & Licensing Branch. The client relocated from their existing Mississauga corporate high rise to the E.C. Drury School for the Deaf – a school campus built in the 1960s where the original site housed vacant classrooms. With a tight budget posing as a key challenge, our design approach was to reuse all existing wall partitions rather than demolish and rebuild. Given that most of the walls were load-bearing, any reconfiguring of the space layout would had to have involved extensive structural work.

 

Communal areas required abatement during removal of existing VCT floor tiles; underneath, the concrete floor slab was ground and polished. The existing terrazzo central corridor was maintained, polished and reused. Work areas were finished with contrasting carpet tile, while feature accent painted walls and ceilings were added to highlight detail elements. Case goods and work surfaces were salvaged from another ministry site and reused for this project. All new lighting are LED including suspended strip fixtures, pot lights and built-in strip lighting for new millwork. Roller shades were installed at all perimeter windows to reduce heat transfer into the space. A number of existing birch millwork pieces were refinished and reused as part of the new programme, while new doors and millwork were clad in North American flat cut cherry veneer.