For most people, a cabana to escape the sun is the shelter of choice on a sandy beach.

But Torontonians will be able to take refuge this winter on a barren stretch of shoreline in the city’s east end, thanks to an international design competition to build warming huts around five lifeguard stations in Beaches Park at the foot of Kew Gardens.

“We’re celebrating the outdoors and the adjacency of the lake,” said Roland Rom Colthoff, the director of RAW architects, the Toronto firm that launched the competition with landscape architect Ted Merrick of Ferris & Associates. “We’re celebrating that landscape in the wintertime, which we would argue is underappreciated.”

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The chosen structures are a novel take on the competition’s theme of warmth, and include a nine-seat swing with fabric to defend against the cold and a throne made of reclaimed wood that offers shelter and a view of the lake from a lifeguard’s perspective.

Colthoff said he and Merrick, a landscape architect, pursued the idea after RAW entered a design competition in Winnipeg for warming huts last year and won with a submission made of pool noodles , which it called “Nuzzles.”

“It was a really wonderful, great experience,” said Colthoff. “People normally hibernate in the cold, and here’s the city of Winnipeg trying to celebrate the cold and celebrating what they can do outdoors.”

The Toronto architects brainstormed and “cribbed liberally” from Peter Hargraves, the architect who launched the Winnipeg warming hut competition . Hargraves helped choose the winner of the Toronto event, which is officially called Winter Stations . The Star’s Christopher Hume was also a judge.

The group launched an open call for submissions on a website this spring and received a “United Nations of entries,” said Colthoff, including submissions from South Korea, China, Japan, Iran, the Netherlands, Belgium and Mexico.

The four winners are from England, the U.S. and Canada. A fifth station was designed by engineering and architectural science students from Ryerson University, who were invited to participate.

The temporary installations in Toronto are a way to celebrate “the culture of living in the city,” said Colthoff. “You don’t want your life to be just day to day — to go home and go to the office and return again. There have to be things or events that bring you together as a society as a culture. And this is a great expression of that.”

Colthoff said local Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon was a “great supporter” of the initiative, as was the city, but there was no money to fund the competition.

In the end, the architects relied on developers to provide the $15,000 needed for each installation. The money will cover the cost of building the artwork as well as the designer’s fee.

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“Those are the only people we know that had cash,” said Colthoff. “There are a lot of other corporations and individuals that would probably have contributed, and hopefully they’ll get on board next year.”