Toronto landmark, The Westin Prince Hotel on York Mills Road has now become the Pan Pacific Toronto and Sign Source Solution helped with the transformation.
Our nimble and efficient sign company helped with the rebrand. We overhauled the signage on the outside of the building and property to help the new hotel owners make a name for themselves in Toronto’s competitive accommodations marketplace.
Originally opened in 1974 as the Prince Hotel Toronto, the property was one of the first and longest-running hotels to be awarded the AAA Four Diamond accreditation in Canada. Pan Pacific Toronto will be the fifth hotel for Pan Pacific Hotels Group in North America, joining other hotels in Vancouver, Whistler in British Columbia and Seattle.
Channel Signs Signal Change at Luxury Hotel
The luxury tower’s evolution into a Pan Pacific brand hotel started one year earlier with a $15 million dollar revitalization of all four hundred and nine guestrooms and public spaces.
Along with sprucing-up the inside the structure, the property designers also needed to polish and rebrand the exterior of the building, and they approached us with a request for new Building Channel Letter signs and Push Thru Acrylic faces on custom outdoor pylon signs for the entrance and exit.
Adhering to the guidelines provided by Pan Pacific directors, we generated mock-ups which are high quality Photoshop images representing the newly proposed sign solutions.
The artist’s vision plus measurements and schematics show how the new signs would look. The documents also outline the sign’s material composition and detail their placement on site. These ‘specs’ are done and submitted to the client, the hotel directors, to allow their design and marketing teams to see the proposed work and make a timely decision.
Two channel letter signs that read ‘Westin’ at the top of the building, one facing North, and one facing South, were removed, and this was a big job. Each character was seven feet tall and made of tin.
We had to assemble and deploy a glaziers’ swing stage over the side of the building on the 22nd floor to give us enough elbow room so we could remove the individual characters. Some of the letters had to be chopped in half and then cut again into even smaller pieces so they’d fit through the rooftop door and into the service elevator on site.
This work was all done successfully on or by Oct 30th 2019, and you can see some glimpses of the ordeal in the triptych above. It’s chilling to behold and we’re going to return and virtual credit card install the replacement soon. Stay tuned for more updates on that part of the project and triumphant photos on our Facebook and Instagram channels.
We refurbished some design elements in the existing pylon signs on the property.
We removed the main entrance canopy sign, and we also removed the four individual Westin branded steel name plates that faced both directions on the entranceway and exit pylon signs.
See the specs for the new replacements. Notice it’s basically the same piece of steel in the background? That’s not by accident. It’s much cheaper to repurpose an existing plate than to source a new sheet of something slightly different. I’m sure the client appreciated our frugality and the environment will appreciate our material conservation.
CThe ground signs faces were made-over by welding new aluminum sheets on top of the old after we cut out the old The Westin Prince name and added the new customer name, Pan Pacific / Toronto and Logo. As I said above we did this instead of sourcing new material and making whole new panels which would have been much more costly.
The Ghost of the Flower Garden Clock Sign
When we removed the old hotel’s name from the clock sign in the flower garden on the south side, we found the letters which had been there for over forty years had left behind a sun bleached phantom imprint of themselves on the cement sidewall. It was a ghost sign.
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recommended the hotel re-paint the parapet which is a smooth concrete half-wall to get rid of the bad memory. But this is nature’s way of reminding us that The Westin Prince Toronto was an indelible landmark and not so easily erased from existence.
Below is the artist’s inspiration for the new flower garden clock sign. Now the letters stand free atop the cement. This is clever for their iconic logo and name will appear as though they’re also golden flowers on display; it’s a well branded welcome bouquet.
This is the proposed methodology for mounting the new sign over the clock garden. You can see how the letters and logo will now sit comfortable atop the cement behind the circular flower bed display.
Everyone is excited about the new hotel and the evolution of this once-Princely establishment. In addition to several new upscale restaurants and other modern on-site amenities, Pan Pacific Toronto will also have 30,000 square feet of meeting spaces including 18 meeting rooms and a ballroom that will accommodate up to seven hundred guests. Most of the meeting rooms have windows and natural light. Events are also possible on the greens.
Do you need a new channel letter sign on your building? Let us design the solution.
