This small box of chocolates might look like simple little house pieces, but they’re anything but. We spent a year and a half working with local, award-winning Cochu Chocolatier to turn our Architecture Soup study pieces into these precise, edible forms. They’re a tiny taste of how we work, thoughtful, rigorous, and rooted in context.

The chocolate pieces come from our Architecture Soup design method, which we created with XYC Design. We first developed the tool for our 16-unit mixed-market project in Inglewood, as a way to help new development fit into existing communities without erasing their DNA. It takes real architectural patterns we observed in the neighbourhood and turns them into a visual, interactive 3D toolkit, supporting better, more context-aware middle housing.

Since then, the tool has gone far beyond that one project. It’s helped spark conversations across the country about how neighbourhoods evolve. At its core, the idea is simple: if we guide change rather than resist it, communities can grow without abandoning the story that built them.

The tiny 3D house pieces that came out of this work looked like candy to us, they were fun, colourful, and playful. So, wanting to share the study in a more tangible way with the people who matter most to us, we collaborated with Cochu to turn those little models into custom chocolates.

We went through all the shapes to figure out which ones would actually work as chocolates. They needed to be a bit thicker, evenly proportioned, and solid enough to mold. Cochu tested nearly every soup piece, and the five shapes that performed the best were the arched window, shingle siding, a gabled roof, the oversized dormer, and a Dutch roof. From there, we 3D-modeled the ideal dimensions for the molds and chose fillings with a longer shelf life so they can be enjoyed over time. Every chocolate was then hand-painted by Cochu’s owner and wrapped one by one.