Figure 1: The pedestrian bridgeway arcs over the Decarie Expressway, connecting Royalmount to the nearby metro station.

Royalmount mall has embraced the notion of luxury as lifestyle – of luxury as an experience to buy into (not to mention buy in). The mall’s developer describes the project as aiming for “inclusive luxury” (Serebrin, 2024): blending the high-market appeal and eyewatering prices of Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton (and other designer brands on the horizon) with the more accessible high street offerings of stores like Uniqlo and H&M. Here, Versace mingles with A&W in a layered palate of consumer tastes and price points – albeit with some strategic experiential design choices that prevent the two ends of that consumer spectrum from ever fully collapsing.

Unlike a more typical mall layout – where prices tend to escalate along with the floors – Royalmount’s luxury offerings dominate the lower floor of the space, while the more accessible stores ring the upper level (alongside the mall’s reimagined food hall, the curiously named Le Fou Fou). Rather than acting as a socio-spatial leveler, this swapped stratification is likely down to transport: the mall’s metro-funneled denizens will arrive via the upper-level pedestrian bridge, while the lower level offers easy access to the adjacent parking.

Beyond the storefronts themselves (more on those in a moment), Royalmount’s experiential marketing of “luxury as lifestyle” come in three prominent forms: the inclusion of nature as a motif, the use of art in the mall, and the sonic atmosphere of the space. Each of these experiential elements seem carefully crafted to differentiate the space from your average mall, courting the liminal even as they mark the space as one of distinction. Here, art meets commerce, “nature” meets “culture,” and a thrumming soundtrack weaves it all together.

Royalmount incorporates the natural (or seemingly natural) in a number of ways, most obviously through the mall’s inclusion of an “urban park” in its design. As we walk into the park from the mall’s interior, the warmth of curry from the upper-level food court mixes with an acrid tinge of cigarette smoke – the park being a more appealing place to indulge the latter minor vice than the nearby parking lots.

The park itself is a curated space. The greenery here has the distinctly sparse appearance of a recently planted garden, even allowing for the fall weather – nothing wild or untamed having yet had a chance to settle in amongst the (no-doubt carefully selected) trees and shrubbery. Alongside the manicured and contained plant life, the park’s assorted sculptures also reference nature: blood orange eagles swarm a gleaming mirrored sphere while psychedelic mushrooms peer curiously down from a nearby rooftop (see Figure 2). The most overtly “touchable” of these installations is the curling metal slide on the park’s periphery (Collectif Escargo’s Dent-de-lion): gilded with a sunshine-yellow flower at its mouth, its body is a vine-like hollow stem that winds to the ground, echoing with laughter from somewhere within.

A smattering of patrons dot the space, but it lacks the animated, social quality of the “urban park” it aspires to be. One might partly attribute this to our late season visit, but it’s likely also a factor of the manicured stone paths that lace predetermined routes through the various art installations and unopened storefronts. Free play here seems contained to the flower-crowned metal slide – of which a couple children (and at least one of our researchers) make audibly delighted use during our visit – and to the promise of a forthcoming skating rink planned for the center of the space. Outside of these designated play areas, there are places to sit and stroll – to see and be seen from the courtyards overhead - but the park seems to impress upon its adult visitors that most of the fun of the space is to be found inside (with wallet in hand).

As both Melanie and María note, elements of the natural also permeate the interior – though, once inside the mall, the curated (and often constructed) use of nature is even more glaring.  The permeability of the space to natural light – via multi-story expanses of windows and a vaulted glass ceiling – was one of the most immediately striking elements of the mall’s design for our researchers. This permeability has a distinct impact on the atmosphere of the space, affording it a lofty, open feeling during the day, while adding a somewhat shadowy intimacy to the experience after nightfall (when the light from the interior of the shops takes over, each a glittering beacon). Where not exposed to the sky, the geometric angles of the mall’s ceiling diffuse both light and sound within (see Figure 3; Figure 4)

Equally striking are the trees in curved stone basins – equal parts planter and bench – dotted throughout the lower level’s corridors. The effect is that the corridors appear like glossy-tiled city streets, with trees offering shelter from the non-existing elements for the promenading citizen-consumer.  On closer inspection, the planters mix the fake and real, with genuine ferns and jade blanketing the base of a counterfeit maple tree. By evening, the spotlight filtering through the faux trees scatters a shadow carpet of leaves over the shop-lined corridors.

The blending of real and counterfeit nature here can also be found inside the mall’s shops.  A young boy seems transfixed by the lethal-looking spikes on a cactus in the window of Le Creuset, but when I later give in and touch my finger to one, I find the rubbery spine bends beneath my touch. Maria recalls looking with confusion at the dried flowers blanketing the ceiling and dotting the walls of L’Occitane en Provence – lavender and immortelle mixed with eucalyptus – only to find the overwhelming scent of the space did not match the flowers she could see.  Eventually, an employee reveals that his manager spritzes the store daily to achieve its signature scent.

Royalmount’s use of nature as motif also characterizes the upper-level food hall. Le Fou Fou – the mall food court reimagined in a more upscale vein – markets itself as a “true feast for the senses” where “[t]welve culinary concepts and three bars create a wild and mouth-watering playground for every palate” (https://www.royalmount.com/en/dining/le-fou-fou). Here, the proffered “wild” seems to come in the form of more plants – potted ones that dot the archways, more fake trees hung with glittering fairy lights, a graphic jungle of leaves on the wallpaper – and sculptures, rather than from the culinary “concepts” on offer (appealing though the latter do smell). Two skeletal fish hover over the hall’s Kishu sushi bar, wooden bones lit from within in soft pink hues – their ghostly presence is at once intriguing and a bit macabre, under the circumstances.

The sculpture parade isn’t confined to the urban park or the food hall, however.  Royalmount proudly offers patrons a “public art walk” across its indoor and outdoor spaces, branding the mall as an “open-sky museum” where “murals, sculptures and photos inspire wonder and reflection.” Inside the mall, sculptures dot the ceiling with a variety of textures – from rattan to rubber –  accessorizing the mall’s upper echelons like so many dangling jewels.  Here, again, the nature motif is evident.  Matthias Pliessing’s mobius-like Amnis, for example, is meant to evoke the meandering path of a bird, its white oak curves a naturalistic contrast to the more contained mobility of the escalators below (https://www.royalmount.com/en/art-walk).

The large-scale art on display throughout the mall is expressly designed to “enhance the experience of its visitors and to make art accessible to everyone”, but it also serves other purposes. Royalmount is – by its developer’s own admission – a work in progress, and one clear (if unspoken) purpose of art in the space is as a placeholder for empty storefronts.  Temporary walls bathed in colour-drenched photography and murals smooth out any gaps between the shiny new storefronts, turning the space into a continuous zone of consumption.  The pieces share visual real estate with similarly-scaled ad campaigns, and it’s often difficult to tell where the art ends and the ads begin.

If Royalmount aims to be a sort of “city-as-shopping-mall” (Sorkin, 1992) complete with urban park and tree-lined corridors, these striking but necessarily ephemeral art installations evoke the role of art as a steppingstone for gentrification (Zukin, 1989).  Here, art disciplines the casual visitor as constant consumer, while seeming to pave the way for more exclusive forms of consumption farther down the line.

One distinguishing feature of Royalmount’s murals are their tell-tale placards, naming art, artist, and provenance as though the mall were indeed a gallery or museum.  The similarity to the museum does not end there, however, particularly in the mall’s luxury lower floors.  Our researchers note how the artful window displays on the lower level seem to mark out a “look, don’t touch” aura around some of the designer boutiques.  People stop to peer in the luxury shop windows, but often seem hesitant to cross the threshold (marked as it often is with distinct splendor and a waiting attendant). Some of the stores – like Saint Laurent – lean into this exclusivity by posting what is effectively a “bouncer” outside, letting patrons into the store individually as though it were a private club. (How “inclusive” is that?) Once inside, the garments and accessories are displayed rather than stocked – sample sized dresses and individual pairs of shoes rebuff the unseemly excesses of the brimming department store rack (even as their prices are excessive to say the least). Rosalin describes the feeling of walking through Saint Laurent as being akin to wandering an art gallery: each product commanding its own atmosphere like a sculpture waiting to be admired.

This is not to say that we, as sensory ethnographers, abided by these look-don’t-touch aesthetics.  For one thing, some textures were simply too tempting to pass up, as when María found herself gliding her hands over Saint Laurent’s display tables – desperate to feel if they were real marble or yet another artifice - and found them cool to her touch.  I remember thrilling at the sumptuous wool of a Sandro coat between my fingers, and the next moment cringing when my heels sunk into the plush carpet in Louis Vuitton, wondering if my well-worn boots would leave a mark.  Jayanthan recounts feeling for the quality of luxury leather goods, testing if his fingers could discern some inherent value that was otherwise lost on him (beyond the aspirational appeal of designer labels).

In fact, Royalmount has a wealth of tactile sensations on offer, for those inclined to seek them out.  The materials used in the luxury storefronts and interior displays showcase a wild variety. In Gucci, the brushed-chrome-like exterior and display pedestals clash with the interior wall texture, which can best be described as “chartreuse wooly bathmat.”  Rudsak’s smooth-faced mannequins stand in stark relief against what looks like - but probably isn’t - a rippling wall of cooled magma. Melanie describes encountering a variety of rock-like textures across the storefronts, the rough stucco, pebbled terrazzo, and veined granite of each a tactile continuation of the mall’s “constructed nature” motif.  Distinct from the smooth, sterile surfaces that mark even some of the upper-floor shops, the contrasting textures in Royalmount’s designer section are one way that stores use sense appeal to communicate the luxury experiences on offer.

True to Royalmount’s claims of making art available to the masses, there is one installation in the mall that offers a more accessible (and downright irresistible) form of tactility. A curving section of one corridor is studded with pillars wrapped in wooly, vibrantly-coloured faux fur.  It’s as though someone has covered the abandoned ruins of a temple wall in Muppet pelts.  We indulge in the feeling of sinking our fingers into the fluffy surface, as do many passersby. The pillars are somewhat distinct from the mall’s parade of visual art (and various selfie stations) in that they appear designed more for greedy hands than for discerning eyes.  Still, many of the mall’s temporary murals also whisper of touch in more subtle ways: from the goose-pimpled skin texture in Laurence Philomène’s Rainbow Skin to the grasping chrome hands in Bikismo’s Amour Fou. Even the video ads seem to reach out to touch passing shoppers.

Oversized hands also feature prominently in the mall’s most immersive installation, located – curiously enough – in the entrance to the lower floor’s expansive all-gender bathroom. Christina Mejas’ Stream III, which features a video projection and looping audio, plunges the visitor into a soundscape of trickling water (in what seems like a risky gambit for the entrance to a toilet).  The sound of the installation is almost encompassing enough to drown out the house music pulsing on either end of the corridor. The music in the bathroom is loud enough to offer privacy and then some – and, combined with the rich aesthetic of the attached mirrored powder room – reignites the sense of having stolen entry into some private members’ club.  While the upper-level toilets are more utilitarian by a wide margin, this bathroom on the lower level – with its immersive art and excesses of space and scale – is perhaps where Royalmount gets closest to achieving “inclusive luxury.”

Most of our researchers noted the unique sonic character of the mall.  While one might expect a mall on a Friday evening to be humming with conversation and ambient noise, the music that Royalmount pumps through every inch of the space blocks out most other sounds. Unlike the pop-laden soundtrack of most malls, the music in Royalmount seems to be largely instrumental and environmental - as Jayanthan notes, a bit like a modern, slightly elevated Muzak. The ambient beats thrumming through the corridors never really coalesce as a memorable tune, but they remain a sonic throughline in the atmosphere of the space.  Absent the aural sociality of snippets of conversation and other convivial goings-on, some researchers found the mall’s soundscape individualizing to the point of loneliness.

Sensory ethnographers by training, we were guided by our noses as much as our eyes, ears, and feet as we moved from store to store.  At first sniff, many of the shops in Royalmount seem to use signature scents, though in some cases the perfume emanates from the wares on offer.  The earthy, warm aroma of Saint Laurent is at least in part courtesy of its genuine leather goods, a sniffable mark of authenticity that spills out of the shop’s closely guarded doorways.  Other aromas conjure up memories of past shopping trips: for María, the rubbery smell of sneakers in Browns are a vivid olfactory reminder of shiny new shoes purchased at the start of a new school year, carrying an unmistakable whiff of potential. This is to say nothing of the designer scents for purchase throughout the mall, including at luxe French perfumers Diptyque and Le Labo.

It's in the latter store that Rosalin reveals the essential role of the the workers at Royalmount in animating the mall’s upmarket ambience.  Her encounter with a salesperson at Le Labo also illuminates the human connections and untold stories that hum beneath the glossy surface of the space – one of several such encounters that define her experience of the mall, more so than any signature scent or sumptuous texture.

Royalmount is undoubtably a celebration of sense appeal, using multisensory delights to hail its desired consumer-citizen and transfigure luxury from brand names into branded ambiences. The sensory ethnographic probes in this section consider how the sensory design of the mall taps into the experience economy.  As the reflections from Jayanthan, María, Melanie, and Rosalin show, the experience of Royalmount is full of felt contradictions: between authenticity and artifice, attraction and repulsion, accessibility and exclusion, sensuality and spectacle.