Montreal Penthouse Renovation: A Minimalist Redesign for Empty Nesters
Jul 23
4 min read
High above the rooftops of Plateau-Mont-Royal, where wrought-iron staircases spiral past century-old brick and small cafés spill onto the sidewalk, a penthouse on Des Pins recently reached a turning point. Its owners' children, now mostly grown and gone, had left behind a home too spacious for its old rhythms yet far too full of memory to hand over to someone else. The question the owners faced was a familiar one for families at this stage of life: let go, or start again.
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Rather than sell, they chose the latter. They turned to Montreal-based studio Entre Quatre Murs to lead a full reinvention of the space — one built not around passing trends, but around the people, art, and daily rituals that had always made the place feel like home. The result is a penthouse that feels less renovated than rediscovered.
The transformation starts with structure. Before the renovation, the penthouse's floor plan carved the home into a string of closed-off rooms, blocking natural light from moving freely between them. Entre Quatre Murs approached the fix with a clear guiding idea: shape the home through volumes, not walls.
A pale oak veneer, running floor-to-ceiling throughout much of the interior, carries that idea through the entire plan. It draws the eye toward the home office, wraps gently around the entrance to the primary suite, and divides the main living area into distinct zones — all without a single solid partition. The wood's warmth softens what could easily have felt like a purely architectural gesture. Every intervention reads as deliberate rather than decorative, meant to clarify how the home flows, not to complicate it further.
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
That same thinking finds its clearest expression around the family's grand piano, an instrument played daily and treated less like furniture than like a member of the household. Entre Quatre Mursgave it a volume entirely its own, wrapped floor-to-ceiling in light wood and set apart from the main living space like a small room within the room. The result is quietly dramatic: surrounded by so much brightness, the piano's glossy black finish becomes the one dark, sculptural mass in an otherwise sunlit interior. It's a shift so simple it barely registers as design, yet it changes how the entire room is read.
It doesn't read as an object on display so much as an instrument simply living there, at ease in its own corner of the home. A similar restraint carries into the nearby lounge, where a navy knotted-rope armchair, a terrazzo side table, and a sculptural pendant light are treated with the same quiet reverence usually reserved for art. Each piece was chosen to stand fully on its own, with the calm of the surrounding space making room for it rather than competing with it.
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Not every decision in this home was meant to be noticed, and that restraint is a skill of its own. In the kitchen, a minimalist island anchors the room while a dropped ceiling quietly houses technical elements overhead, and a slim, linear light fixture draws a clean line rather than commanding attention. The space opens naturally onto a round dining table set within the curve of the penthouse's glazed façade. There, sweeping views over the neighbourhood's rooftops become an artwork in their own right, framed rather than forced.
That same discretion continues into the primary suite, where a wood storage volume doubles as an archway, quietly folding the bathroom entrance into the architecture itself. Oak does much of this understated work throughout the home, valued for its durability and its refusal to compete for attention through colour. At the same time, matte finishes hold a soft dialogue with the occasional metal accent. Nothing here was designed to shout; it forms a backdrop steady enough to hold the space together and quiet enough to let the family's art, furniture, and beloved piano remain its true focus.
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
In the end, this renovation was never really about square footage. It was about a family choosing to stay in the place where they had built a life, and a studio giving them the tools to see it with new eyes. By designing around what already mattered most — light, art, music, and memory — Entre Quatre Murs didn't just update a penthouse on Des Pins. It gave an honest, quieter new chapter somewhere real to begin.
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Montreal Penthouse Renovation. Photography by Alex Lesage
Founded in 2009, Entre Quatre Murs is a Montreal-based high-end interior design and architecture studio specializing in large-scale residential and commercial projects, in both renovation and new construction. Driven by a team of young, passionate designers, the studio is dedicated to creating living spaces that are unique, timeless, warm, and deeply personalized. Its primary goal: to enhance the comfort of its clients' lives, evoke genuine emotion, and translate their identities into spaces that truly reflect who they are. To achieve this, its approach rests on three core pillars: functionality, materiality, and light.
Combining human and collaborative practice with meticulous attention to detail and a relentless pursuit of the finest available resources, the team at Entre Quatre Murs creates spaces imbued with a lasting sense of well-being and rightness. For these designers, life is a succession of experiences, a collection of moments and memories — and design shapes the setting in which most of them unfold. They believe, therefore, that working with an interior designer goes far beyond creating an aesthetically pleasing space: it is about crafting a space that reflects the personalities of its inhabitants and nurtures their fulfillment.
Recognized on numerous occasions for the quality of its work, the close-knit team at Entre Quatre Murs is a mosaic of talents committed to excellence and dedicated to redefining, day after day, the spaces we inhabit. With more than sixteen years of practice, the studio continues to grow through a careful selection of projects and an established presence in international design competitions and publications.
