A first look at the restored art deco 9th floor of the Montreal Eaton Centre

The ninth floor of the Montreal Eaton Centre may have been frozen in time after it was shuttered in 1999, but this year it's being plunged back to 1931, revived to its former glory.

At a time of economic trouble in the 1930s, the Île-de-France restaurant was a destination, a place for people to float above their woes, leave them on the street down below. Those people, from all walks of life, dressed to the nines to dine — French, English, rich, poor. Prices were accessible and the food, delectable.

Lady Flora Eaton, whose family owned Eaton's, the old Eaton Centre, had commissioned architect Jacques Carlu to recreate the dining room he built on the Île-de-France transatlantic oceanliner. 

"It was something completely new for Montrealers, kind of a new sense of modernity and luxury that didn't exist here," said Georges Drolet, the architect who spearheaded the space's restoration with his team at EVOQ, a firm specializing in heritage sites. 

"People would come here and kind of live their best life in a way." 

But by the time it closed in 1999, shortly after Eaton's filed for bankruptcy, the 500-seat restaurant had lost some of its old glamour. It had become a buffet and the walls were a 1980s palette of peach and light yellow. 

Twenty-five years later, the hidden gem is being reopened to the public next month. And in a colour palette of light grey and beige as close to the original as possible, said Drolet, who could tell from old black-and-white photographs that the walls were lighter at the beginning. 

The space is in fact as close to its original state as Drolet could get it. As one of the few sites in Quebec whose heritage status focuses on its interior, nearly every aspect is expected to be maintained.

"For the most part, everything was preserved," said the project's head manager Jimmy Lévesque. A wallpaper company revived a defunct line of production to create the fabric covering parts of the dining hall walls, which double as acoustic controls. 

"They had a violinist come and play for a test and the sound was just incredible," Lévesque said.

Even the 500 chairs, which are not stackable and therefore too inconvenient to use, have to be kept. The vertical frescos at both ends, painted by Carlu's wife Natacha Carlu, are still there. The former linoleum flooring is intact in many places, save for the middle of the room, where it was recovered by a similar material bearing the same pattern. The redone herringbone wood floors surrounding the cocktail bar are indistinguishable from a small patch of the original. 

Marble adorning columns and various surfaces was simply polished. The old sinks in the bathrooms, with their tubular porcelain pipe covers, were reinstalled.  

In two smaller rooms on either side of the dining hall, the silver-plated wallpaper has been recovered with the same material. 

The doors, trimmings, air vents and light fixtures made of the historic metal alloy Monel are all still in place with their funky geometric designs despite new ventilation and electrical systems.