There’s a new trend shaping up in the high-end furnishings market with suppliers peddling not just products but lifestyle as well. Three new showroom retail stores exemplify the shift: solid-surfacing supplier Cosentino and seating manufacturer Montauk Sofa in Toronto’s King East Design District, and Maison Territo in Montréal’s Royalmount upmarket mega-mall, billed as “the first Canadian destination to unite the most iconic Italian design houses under one roof,” including Fendi Casa, Dolce & Gabbana Casa, Versace Home, Bentley Home, and Gallotti & Radice.
No surprise that these businesses are popping up in Canada’s largest cities. According to Milan-based World Furniture Online by CSIL, high-end furniture accounts for nearly 15 per cent of sales within the global furniture industry. Their “World Market for High-End, Luxury & Design Furniture” report states that “North America is the largest market thanks to its concentration of affluent consumers, including over 40 per cent of global millionaires.”
Cosentino Toronto City Center
“There’s been a clear shift in how luxury showrooms are conceived. They’ve evolved into immersive, experiential spaces that tell a story about how we live with design,” said Heather Dubbeldam, principal of her eponymous Toronto architecture firm and architect of record for Cosentino’s new Toronto City Centre showroom. “[Cosentino] embodies this approach, presenting its surfacing materials in full-scale environments that blur the line between display and architecture. It’s not just about what luxury looks like, but how it feels.”
Cosentino moved from its former digs, located in “nosebleed territory” north of St. Clair Ave. near Elte Carpet. “We wanted to go to a new, cooler place that was more posh and with a lot of designers around,” explained Cosentino interior design manager Cristina Hernán Mateos. The master design for City Centre showrooms worldwide was created by Cosentino’s in-house design team. “There’s a connection with wood,” Hernán Mateos said. “We didn’t want to make the showroom all stone because that would be too cold. The wood brings in the look of nature for more warmth. The inspiration for the showroom is the coastal or Mediterranean eco look.” Indeed, the colour palette is sun-bleached. The coastal theme was applied with restraint, sans fishing nets, hemp macrame or other kitschy maritime elements.
The guiding concept was to create a showroom that goes beyond product display to helping designers envision their projects brought to life with Cosentino materials. Vignettes within the showroom portray relatable, inspirational, real-life applications: a hotel reception desk: a fireplace: an executive meeting/dining room and an open working Gaggenau kitchen with Kohler faucets. They are populated with furniture, fabrics, carpet and architectural lighting from Spanish suppliers Andreu World, Gancedo, naturtex and Vibia, respectively. There is even a fully functioning, accessible “Bathelier” zone showcasing how designers can specify a seamless, unified look using Dekton product for sinks and shower trays as well as traditional bathroom applications such as vanities, walls and floors.
To exploit the showroom’s corner site with its double-height space and windows on two sides, rotating lozenge-shaped metal frames exhibiting slabs of Cosentino surfaces face the street to create public-facing displays, plugging the showroom experience into Toronto’s urban fabric and engaging passersby.
Cosentino’s new Dekton Ukiyo product skirts that lozenge-shaped hotel-reception desk, actually the welcome desk/kitchen island. Ukiyo’s ribbed surface is something new under the sun for a product category previously available only as smooth or subtly textured slabs. The fluted material emulates the wood tambour fronts and wood-slat screens reposing nearby in the showroom. (Ukiyo is the Japanese term for the urban lifestyle of that country’s Edo period, circa 1600 to 1867, and to the prints of contemporaneous artists such as Hokusai and Hiroshige who engraved their images into woodblocks. The ribbed texture also evokes the patterns of raked sand in Zen gardens.) The worksurface is equally intriguing. The 60mm countertop was built by layering three 20mm Silestone slabs, each separated by a five millimetre groove, creating gaps that add depth and texture without compromising strength.
Montauk Sofa
There’s a connection to the new Montauk Sofa showroom a few blocks away: the roof terrace is surfaced in Cosentino’s Dekton panels. The Toronto flagship continues the house style of industrial shabby chic and lush landscaping set a few years ago by the Montréal mother ship, which reposes within the partially preserved shell of a 1940s-era factory. Both locations were designed by Winnipeg- and Montréal-based Cohlmeyer Architecture. The Toronto outpost boasts tall grasses near the sidewalk and atop the terrace. “We always like to bring in the garden effect,” said Montauk Sofa founder and owner Tim Zyto, in an interview. “In Montréal, we tore down the first 25 per cent of the building to build our garden.”
But first, you must be wondering, what’s the origin story of the proudly Canadian company (everything is custom made in their Montréal factory) with the Yankee name that began operations in 1995? “I read The Gold Coast, this really cheesy novel by Nelson DeMille,” Zyto said of the 1990 book by the New York Times-bestselling thrillers author that takes place amongst mansions built during the Great Gatsby era of the early 20th century when the Vanderbilts, Guggenheims and Astors erected lavish estates on Long Island’s north shore in towns such as Oyster Bay and Glen Cove. Zyto and his girlfriend would explore those places, “and we would often end up at beautiful homes in Montauk that were quite significant but subtle; you would never see anything much from the street.” Montauk is on Long Island’s eastern tip, where celebrities such as Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon, Edward Albee and Princess Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy’s sister) lived. It happened that Zyto was looking to name his fledgling business. “I thought, oh, ‘significant and subtle,’ that’s good for us. Our sofas are not flashy, but they’re quite substantial. I wasn’t going to call my company Oyster Bay, but Montauk was a cool name.”
The four-storey, 8,000-sq.-ft. Toronto showroom is a renovation and adaptive-reuse of a 1920s building with an underground tunnel, rumour has it, for bootleggers to smuggle alcohol. The main intervention on the exterior was to add a sense of massiveness to the façade. “We thought the building looked flat,” said Montauk Sofa co-founder and design head Danny Chartier. To that end, new anodized-aluminum window surrounds protrude nine inches, adding rhythm to the façade and literally framing views of the upmarket sofas, sectionals, chairs, beds and outdoor furniture within.
The main floor features a Valcucine show kitchen, aligning with Montauk Sofa’s exclusive distribution of the line in Canada. The space is finished with white oak narrow-plank floors and parged concrete walls. The lower level retains the building’s original brick and stone walls. The furniture and fabric library located on the second floor provides a work environment for designers to collaborate with clients. “A lot of designers don’t have offices anymore; they’re welcome to come here and meet their clients,” Chartier said. On the top floor, new perimetrical skylights flood the interior with daylight.
Throughout, the focus is always on the sofa; there’s never a sense of clutter or claustrophobia from too many accessories. “We want to keep it simple,” Zyto said. “The messaging is simple. The advertising is simple. The sofas are simple. The spaces are simple. We’re debating the design of our next store: It will be very raw.”
Further drawing eyeballs to the sofas is the impressive array of high-touch fabrics that drape them, such as embossed velvet with thick ridges evoking brain coral; and thick, nubbly bouclé. Unlike the well-tailored perfection at Cosentino, a more casual and “comfy” spirit prevails. “For us it’s always about comfort,” Zyto said. “We want you to live in the sofa. Our idea of success is that you jump in there Friday night and you stay there happily ‘till Monday morning.”
Maison Territo
At Maison Territo, a series of playfully overlapping arcs, evocative of giant-scale croquet arches and, not by coincidence, a Fendi brand identifier, animate the landscape and draw the passersby’s eyes to the entrance. And speaking of brand identifiers, for the 11,000-sq.-ft. project, “The big challenge was to work with the egos and aesthetic standards of different companies that don’t love each other,” said Patrick Blanchette, who heads his eponymous Montréal-based architecture firm, blanchette archi.design. A pervasive communal Maison Territo look was established using a polished-concrete floor running like an allée through the collections from one end of the lengthy floorplate to the other.
Speaking of brands, folded champagne aluminum in the custom integrated display shelving, and peinture à chaud wall finish (traditional cement painting), signify Fendi, for example, which occupies half the floorplan. As for its signature motif, “Every time you look at Fendi furniture, you see the arches,” says Blanchette. They’re embodied in the back and arms of a sofa, pendant lighting, the large photograph over the sofa of a surrealist de Chirico-esque arcade, and in the Lagerfeld-designed cast-aluminum table.
Fendi white clashes with Versace white, but no one notices when the tall pivoting doors, covered in a visually permeable 3D-textured metal mesh, close off the Fendi shop-in-shop while allowing shoppers to remain oriented to the rest of the boutique. Each brand’s zone boasts a decorative feature wall that doubles as a selfie backdrop, such as the Fendi Casa HDF wall sector embellished with CNC-routered interlocking “F” logo figures.
At Versace, characteristic brand touches include Arabesco marble walls, silver and gold finishes and an element of retro modernism. “Dolce & Gabbana is another really expressive brand with big patterns. The brand is really black,” said Blanchette, who created lacquer-black display shelving with wide, eight-foot bays and downlighting on the front and back of each shelf. The giant LED screen on the back wall, on axis with the entry, draws shoppers into the zone. A frosted-glass conference room can be reserved by designers to meet confidentially with their clients. Bentley, meanwhile, is notable for the minimalist gesture of slim floating leather-covered steel shelving anchored in the dark volcanic stone-sheathed back wall.
Maison Territo is named after co-founder David Territo. Fittingly, the first and last feature visitors see is the cash wrap near the entry, which doubles as a bar and kitchen because “in Italian culture, the kitchen is the heart of the family,” Blanchette said. It also makes the statement that the place, at the end of the day, is a lifestyle store. And an upscale one at that, as the willow-tree-inspired, USD$86,000 gold-leaf Saule pendant lighting by Larose Guyon, based in Verchères, Que., makes clear. Because the chandelier is yellow, the accent colour, your eye zooms to it. “We wanted to showcase the Québec design industry along with the international major brands.”
As featured in the November-December 2025 issue of Canadian Interiors magazine.
