A Family Affair: Maison Territo Is More than a Showroom for Designer Furniture

In Montreal’s Royalmount shopping centre, the who’s-who of Montreal fashion and design gathered last month to celebrate one of the complex’s newest stores: Maison Territo. More than a furniture showroom, it’s an immersive haven of maximalist design, with over 11,000 square feet of details to pique every sense, from the bergamot-tinged custom scent wafting through the air to the dulcet tones of the in-shop piano, plus a dizzying mix of patterns and textures throughout, from marble to mahogany to Murano glass.

Overseen by the award-winning Blanchette architects, the sprawling space is separated into four main sections, each showcasing a featured design house—Fendi Casa, Versace Home, Dolce & Gabbana Casa, and Bentley Home—while also reflecting its unique aesthetics and ethos. Bentley’s mahogany and leather speak to the brand’s luxury car origins, while Dolce & Gabbana goes wild with animal print couches and carpets. Smaller home goods such as candles and monogrammed blankets accent each space, and a 17-foot bar proves a striking gathering place beneath a sculptural light fixture from Quebec’s Larose Guyon.

David Territo and Liv Siv-Ing.

“We wanted it to feel like a home, not a store,” says the CEO and co-founder, David Territo. He launched the business along with his wife, Liv Siv-Ing, who previously worked in fashion sales and marketing. The idea was born from tragedy and chance, a way to pay tribute to his family legacy, including two brothers who passed away from cancer, and from a meeting during the couple’s yearly pilgrimage to the Milan Furniture Fair. It was there that a valued contact made an impression telling the stories of each of Territo’s now-featured brands, all available together for the first time in Canada. “A coup de foudre,” Siv-Ing calls it. Fate.

It wasn’t just that these houses were high-end or tied to reputable designers, names with weight that can’t be bought, but that they all had what mattered most to the couple: a rich family history. Whether Adele and Edoardo Fendi opening a boutique in 1925, their five daughters hiring Karl Lagerfeld in 1965, or Domenico Dolce meeting Stefano Gabbana, all are a lesson in resilience, and a model for Territo and Siv-Ing in working together. “You can’t just create a chair—it’s got to have the engineering and the creativity,” Siv-Ing says, likening her husband’s approach to the essential structure and hers to the upholstery.

Maison Territo’s story begins back in 1972, when David Territo’s parents Calogero and Francesca Territo founded Casavogue. At the time, there was a schism forming in the world of furniture, and what was previously the stuff of future family heirlooms and antique stores—hardwood dressers and dining tables gifted at a wedding and kept forever—was suddenly being rivalled by composite materials and new, cheaper competitors. (For context: the first IKEA opened in Canada in 1976, in Richmond, B.C.) Yet while others zigged, the Territo family zagged, with cabinetmaker and patriarch Calogero Territo shifting his business to import Italian furniture, and David and his brothers learning the ropes from childhood.

“People come to us and say, ‘I still have the bedroom set you sold me there 40 years ago,’” Territo says of the 35,000-square-foot Casavogue store in Montreal’s Saint-Léonard (a traditional home to Montreal’s Italian community).

While the store continues to sell both Italian and Canadian furniture, brands like Calligaris, Colibri, Durham, and Jaymar, it’s clear Maison Territo takes luxury up a notch. Still, the couple is adamant that whatever statement the Maison Territo pieces make, they are meant to be lived with, not admired from afar—even the leopard-print couch.

“A home is your personal space, what you do day-to-day, not just visuals,” Siv-Ing says. “The pieces you buy today can be the ones you pass down in the future.”

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