There are sports facilities, and then there are spaces that make you want to stay long after the last match. Kopa, a new indoor racket sports club in the Pointe-Saint-Charles neighbourhood of Montreal, belongs firmly in the second category.
Set inside a freestanding single-story industrial building of roughly 20,000 square feet, the project is the work of Montreal studio Ivy Studio, and it arrives as something genuinely unexpected: a space that takes the utilitarian bones of manufacturing heritage and runs them through a hospitality lens so refined it feels more like a members’ club than a public sports venue.
The design hinges on a single, audacious decision: a radical color split that divides the building into two entirely distinct worlds. The athletic hall, soaring to a 24-foot ceiling, is wrapped head-to-toe in warm beige. Courts, metal framing, wall panels, even the open ceiling with its rugged acoustic finish, all share the same tone-on-tone envelope. The original concrete floor slab was preserved and polished throughout, its 4-foot-high foundation wall left completely raw and unpainted as a tactile nod to the building’s manufacturing past. Against this pale industrial canvas, the high-performance sports floors read in crisp black with white boundaries. The effect is monastic. Clean. Almost architectural in its restraint. The hospitality zones are drenched, floor to ceiling, in a deep and saturated burgundy red that compresses the space into something intensely warm.
Step through into the lower hospitality portion of the building, where ceilings drop to 12 feet, and the world changes entirely. Reception, the sanitary block, the lounge: all of it drenched, floor to ceiling, in a deep and saturated burgundy red. Walls, ceilings, cabinetry, tiles, upholstery. The effect is intentional compression. The color closes in, and the intimacy spikes.
The entrance deposits guests into a minimalist reception and pro shop where a long counter of red-stained oak is topped with stainless steel. Behind it, backlit arched display niches showcase padel rackets with the seriousness of objects in a gallery. A sculptural monolithic lightbox anchors the whole composition overhead. It is a retail moment, but it does not feel like retail.
Beyond, the layout opens into a social lounge built around a central island bar: a low, rounded block of red-stained wood with integrated storage that keeps sightlines open toward the padel courts. Bar stools in rich red velvet sit on polished stainless steel frames. Banquettes in dark burgundy leather run down either side, paired with stone-topped tables. The ceiling carries long recessed light boxes in red wood with dimmed LED arrays interspersed among surface-mounted square fixtures. It is dim, intentionally so. The whole zone operates more like a late-night bar than a post-match lounge.
In the sanitary spaces, the commitment to the concept reaches its most immersive point: walls and custom vanity counters wrapped entirely in square red ceramic tiles, stainless steel hardware throughout, and cutout mirrors with glowing integrated backlighting that turn a washroom into something closer to a backstage dressing room.
The athletic program is substantial: four professional padel courts, a pickleball court tucked into the far corner, and a glass-enclosed fitness room. Spectator infrastructure is woven in through custom red-stained wood bleachers with rubber tops and built-in planters, a long two-tier piece between courts and lounge and a larger three-tier grandstand along the southern perimeter. A glass-enclosed wellness hub at the rear houses mat pilates and yoga, a reformer room, and a small private lounge between the two spaces. The pilates studio can be enclosed behind a deeply pleated beige curtain, transforming the glazed box into an insulated cocoon when the class calls for it. Kopa does not apologize for its ambition. It is a sports club that has decided to be beautiful about it.
What Ivy Studio has pulled off here is a genuinely difficult thing: a sports facility with real design conviction, where every material choice is legible and intentional, where the hospitality zones hold their own against the athletic ones, and where the overall experience feels singular. The $2M CAD budget for a 20,000-square-foot gut renovation is not extravagant, which makes the finish and the conceptual clarity all the more impressive.
Kopa does not apologize for its ambition. It is a sports club that has decided to be beautiful about it. In a city with a strong design culture and a fast-growing padel community, it lands as exactly the kind of place Montreal has been waiting for.
Design + Architecture: Ivy Studio
Construction: Duquette Construction
Photography: Alex Lesage
Budget: $2M CAD
Location: Pointe-Saint-Charles, Montreal, Quebec, Canada