Cool Hunting

Domison is a modern furniture boutique that opened just over a month ago in Montreal's Plateau district. The brainchild of brother and sister design team Thien and My Ta Trung, their aim is to offer well-designed aesthetically-pleasing home furnishing to design-savvy consumers. I had a chance to sit down with My recently to ask her a few questions about the store and its concept.

As Designers how did you decide it was time to open a boutique?
The boutique is the flagship store for our new line Domison, a modern and sophisticated furniture collection. We wanted to have one space that would showcase our personalities and diffuse design to everyone. The store is also a parallel platform to showcase the accessories of some of the best local design studios such as Furni, Looolo, Coe & Waito and Loyal Loot.

Tell us more about the Domison line.
The Domison line is about a state of mind, one that is fresh, sophisticated, modern and youthful. We cover all the furniture for the home: living room, dining room, bedroom, etc.

You also design under the name Periphere , what's the difference between the two brands?
The two brands have very distinct personalities. Periphere is about concept and ideas. The furniture designed under Periphere is at the frontier of art/scupture/design/furniture. When we design for Periphere we don't care about such factors as comfort, sizes constraints, or usefulness. But for Domison, we want to bring edgy and modern design that actually will fit in most design-driven homes. The focus is on rigorous lines, thoughtful details, comfort and great execution.

Is now the time for such a store?
We've been working on Perihpere for the last seven years. It's a very exclusive and conceptual brand that caters to a super thin crowd. We wanted to reach more people so we launched this new line that is edgy but yet not overly conceptual. With the store we hope to reach more design and fashion driven people.

How do you choose the other items that you showcase?
As an independent player (in a sea of corporate enterprises such as IKEA, Crate & Barrel, EQ3, etc....) we know how difficult it is to push our design ideas out there, so with the store, we want to be a platform for independent studios to showcase their products. We basically are only interested in carrying the work of smaller studios who produce spectacular and unique products.

What does the future hold?
We want to focus on the store for the moment, make it an inspiring place for anyone who like design. We are working on selling and distributing our Domison line to retailers across Canada/U.S. We're also working on an outdoor furniture collection that should be available in 2009.

Domison
4117 Boulevard St-Laurent
Montréal, QC Canada map
tel. +1 514.733.8588