here's a purple-haired girl perched on a lime green settee playing footsie with a young tattooed guy in a ripped Diesel shirt. Two very Rosedale-looking moms sit idle a couple of tables over and watch the young’ns adventure. Boisterous groups of twenty-somethings lounge on designer sofas with cocktails and sip wine. These factors, along with slick décor and cool cocktails, combine to create a luxe drinking spot tucked behind the Bloor Street InterContinental.

Now, we're as into hotel lounges as the next guy, but frankly, we find most of them – even the cutting edge ones of late - to be pure text-book formula. They tend to range from a.) Designer model, b.) High-end minimalist or c.) The British Pub theme. And now we have another one; the just-opened Skylounge would be – a.) designer model. What was formerly home to a mostly ignorable patio space, that had long outlived its usefulness, has been revitalized - Cecconi Simone style. In came the designers, not to renovate the space per se, but to revitalize the space with summerish accouterments, and to give the space a name.

But saccharine timidity is what's really served up by this summer drinkery, as the InterConti directors seem unwilling to fully commit to a complete overhaul. But if God is in the details, the details may as well be designer furniture.

And damn fine designer furniture it is; partly re-thought by Cecconi Simone, designer sofas, Brazilian wood cocktail tables and silk pillows were trucked in straight from Simone’s Oni One showroom. With tidy arrangements of table settings and cool corners of tufted sofas, Skylounge makes that little walkway off Bloor Street worthwhile.

InterContinental General Manager Yannis Anagnostakis has smartly positioned his updated Skylounge as a sort of hipsters' meeting and greeting grounds before they trek on elsewhere to do more serious meeting and greeting. Anagnostakis readily acknowledges the pitfalls and perceptions that plague the bar biz, and with Simone’s aesthetic sense, they’ve made sure to blend in - and perhaps bump up - the Bloor & Ave look and feel. Pre- and post-ROM. Uh, except for the purple-haired girls, that is.