Moooi at Maison Territo: Transform Your Space With Art
1 day ago
2 min read
A quilted armchair shaped like stacked hay. A lounge chair with a snarling, embroidered face stitched into its back. Straps in which none are strictly needed. A face where no one is expected. Objects like these don't disappear into a room — they argue with it.
Maison Territo. Photo credit: Phil Bernard
At Royalmount, in Montreal, Maison Territo has just added the Dutch house Moooi to its floor, and every piece behaves the same way once it lands: instead of filling a corner, it reroutes the whole space around itself. Founded in the Netherlands in 2001 by Marcel Wanders and Casper Vissers, Moooi arrives in Canada carrying twenty-five years of that same conviction. The house's whole philosophy sits inside one extra letter in its own name — proof that beauty, taken seriously, is allowed to take up more room than it strictly needs.
Function gets handled. It just isn't the headline.
Moooi's pieces solve real problems — seating, light, storage — with real precision. But they're conceived first as presences, not solutions. A chair has to hold weight. It doesn't have to look calm about it.
Known figures return throughout the collection, but distorted just enough to feel new again. Bigger than expected. Stranger than expected. Occasionally funnier than furniture has any right to be. Nothing in the lineup pretends to be simple, and nothing apologizes for that either.
Known shapes, rewired
Nicholas Baker's Haybale Lounge Chair with Footstool takes the stacked hay bale — plain, rural, entirely unglamorous — and rebuilds it as quilted upholstery cinched with bold cotton straps. The reference reads instantly. The execution reads nothing like a farm.
Marcel Wanders goes further with the Monster Chair: an embroidered face on the backrest, generous cushioned upholstery underneath, comfort and theatre sharing the same seat cushion. It shouldn't work. It does.
Light gets the same treatment. Studio Toer's Flock of Light strings fine bronze wires, brass cups, and small LED diffusers into a form that reads as sparse geometry by day and a warm swarm of fireflies after dark. Rick Tegelaar's Meshmatics Chandelier performs a similar trick on galvanized wire netting, an unglamorous industrial material stretched and layered into three nested forms until it holds light instead of just fencing something in. Transparent. Precise. Nothing like the raw material it started as.
Presence over function
“Some pieces fill a room. Others give it a voice — that is what we recognised in Moooi.” - David Territo and Liv Siv Ing, founders of Maison Territo.
That's the whole argument, really. A Moooi piece rarely just completes a room. It sets the room's mood, establishes its rhythm, and sometimes becomes the reason the rest of the space gets built around it — a way of working, the founders note, that has long shaped Maison Territo's own approach to design.
Monster chair and Meshmatics lamp. Photo credit: Moooi Haybale lounge chair and Flock of Light lamp. Photo credit: Moooi
