Bet on Edmonton

By Caroline Gault

This story was originally published in the October 2025 edition of Edify.

Photography by Paul Swanson

It’s June.

The streets are buzzing with playoff energy as the Edmonton Oilers battle the Florida Panthers in their second straight Stanley Cup final — outcome still unknown when I meet Lauren Kyle McDavid, 29 and newly married. She’s pared down in low-rise, wide-leg, cocoa-coloured jeans and a cocoa tee, her blonde hair swept into a high ponytail. She appears unfazed by the demands of her husband’s high-pressure career, even on the morning after a loss, because it’s been full steam ahead for the grand opening of her business ventures with Edmonton design insider Brittany Schulz, 32.

The business partners leased the long-vacant Canada Permanent Building and refined it as a three-storey showcase of luxury: design studio up top, furniture gallery and cocktail bar below. The concept feels members-only, yet welcomes anyone who wants — and can afford — a taste of the elevated lifestyle Kyle McDavid and Schulz have curated. Kyle McDavid’s six-year-old design business, Kyle and Co., anchors the top floor, while the lower levels debut two new ventures: Trove Living — a high-end furniture showroom and retail space — and Bar Trove — a 40-seat restaurant and cocktail bar. Blending luxury shopping with intimate, small-plate dining, the concept resembles Restoration Hardware Restaurants around the world, and offers an experience more common in Europe.

“What you’re seeing is two things that might not go together in your head actually go together really seamlessly — and feed off each other,” says Kyle McDavid as she welcomes me into the Trove Living showroom, sipping on a house-brand Trove coffee. She sits on a curved and cocoon-like custom-made sofa, Trove’s 1947 “Jean Royère–inspired Polar Bear reproduction,” Schulz later tells me — a design favoured by the stars.

The space is clean and clutter-free, styled in a soft, neutral palette with low-profile marble and wood coffee tables, pale oak herringbone floors, sculptural lighting fixtures and exposed white ducts. It’s a curated juxtaposition to the decorative crown mouldings and wainscotting, both of which Kyle McDavid and Schulz added to reinforce the building’s historic charm.

“When we originally started the business,” Schulz explains, “the idea was that you would meet with Lauren for a furniture or design package upstairs, come down to the furniture showroom to shop and then have lunch and celebrate after in the bar on the main floor.” Schulz, dressed in a sleek black ensemble, is composed and precise, the perfect operational counterweight to Kyle McDavid’s visionary role.

Their relationship developed organically over the years as Schulz worked as an external furniture rep for Kyle McDavid’s interior design business. A solid partnership between the two has proven key in renovating the Edwardian Baroque building. Billed as Edmonton’s first “fireproof bank,” the building’s structural skeleton is composed of reinforced concrete framing and detailed stonework, features that make structural renovations a major challenge.

To overcome this, Kyle McDavid and Schulz had to track down the original architectural plans and hire an engineer to dissect the structural slabs. “They’re hand drawn and very difficult to read,” says Kyle McDavid. “There were a lot of hoops to go through.” They also worked closely with the city’s historic committee to make sure the signage was appropriate for the building’s grand exterior: soaring stone columns, ornate carved detailing and an arched, entablature entrance that once signalled prestige in early 20th-century Edmonton.

In the name of exclusivity, it was a hurdle they were willing to clear to create a destination where Edmonton shoppers could access rare, investment-grade furnishings. While Trove carries some more accessibly priced furniture pieces, their high-end European imports, such as the Italian line Tacchini and Collection Particulière from Paris, start in the low four figures, with hero pieces climbing well into five. According to the duo, no one else in Western Canada carries the lines, which they sell alongside a selection of vintage items from antique hubs in Milan, Texas and North Carolina. “Not everyone can afford super high-end furniture, and not everyone cares about brand names when they’re putting their space together,” says Kyle McDavid. “But there are really passionate design people who want a collectible piece in their home — something with a rich history.”

There’s also a clear intention to spotlight local talent. Handwoven tapestries by Edmonton textile artist Jessica Kyca hang prominently on walls, and a local woodworker has been brought in-house to help craft pieces for the Trove furniture line. That ethos continues downstairs at Bar Trove, where the ivory-glazed ceramic charcuterie boards, rippled like draped fabric, were commissioned by Trove and handmade in Calgary. Bar Trove doubles as a showroom: selected plates and glassware, and even the house olive oil, are sold in their retail space across the corridor so that guests can buy the very items they experience in the bar.

Cozy and intimate, Bar Trove is smaller than you’d expect and feels like a secret New York lounge that might require a password to get in. The interior — with its floral-upholstered couches, panelled wood walls and show-stopping deep rouge fireplace (newly built, but convincingly vintage) — mixes the palette and ornateness of a Parisian salon with the brooding richness of a British drawing room. The effect is indulgent, transportive, yet grounded in the historical space it inhabits.

At the heart of the room is a dramatic bar with a custom base by Edmonton’s Forge 53, wrapped in marble veined with blush and gold and flanked by brass shelves. And just when you think the design details are the main event — enter the menu.

With food curated by chef Eric Hanson, formerly of The Marc, the seafood-focused menu rotates with party-ready fare, like freshly shucked oysters and a decadent lobster linguini that also appears in Kyle McDavid’s debut cookbook — one more in a growing list of entrepreneurial ventures.

Five Businesses, But Who’s Counting

As we climb the staircase, original to the building and solid with every step, Kyle McDavid warns me: “My office is still a little bit of a construction zone.”

She isn’t kidding. As we walk into the third-floor Kyle and Co. headquarters, it’s all hustle: meetings in progress, boxes to unpack, decisions to make and employee questions flying her way (she employs 21 full-time staff across her ventures, plus contractors). Lenard — the McDavids’ Instagram-famous dog — patters around beneath a bank of desks stacked with Macs and moodboards. The space hums with the kind of startup energy instantly recognizable to anyone who’s worked in early-stage businesses.

In a small corner stockroom, modern rancher jackets and soft knitwear with subtle Oilers branding are folded with care — remnants of the 2025 launch collection for Sports Club Atelier (if you’re counting, that’s her fifth business). The minimalist-chic line of game-day apparel sold out on its first drop.

Although it debuted in partnership with the Edmonton Oilers in 2025, the idea dates back to 2017, when custom jackets designed and worn by players’ wives and girlfriends — also known as WAGs — gained traction. What began as a niche fashion trend has since become a viable commercial offshoot for pro teams, but that attention can cut both ways for the women behind the designs. As noted by a July 2025 New York Times feature titled “With All Eyes on Them, a ‘WAG’ Style Emerges,” being a WAG comes with instant resources and rocket-fuel publicity, yet their own impressive achievements are often overshadowed — and undervalued — because the public credits their success to their pro-athlete husbands and boyfriends.

Carving out an identity of their own can take years (even for a Spice Girl). Kyle McDavid is up for it. Five ventures in, she isn’t surprised by Sports Club Atelier’s success. The pieces cost no more than an Oilers jersey; they’re just made to turn heads beyond the arena. And that contrast is her business blueprint: elevate a game-day jacket, or transform a century-old bank into a home for luxury furniture, cocktails and caviar. Each venture mirrors her lifestyle — and now Edmonton can buy in. Can a city that prides itself on quiet wealth rise to the challenge?

“I get fired up whenever people ask me this question,” she says. “I don’t think we have a complicated relationship with polish and ambition. We’ve just been afraid to do it — but when we do, people follow. They just need to see it first.”

She is fearless in the belief that if you build it, Edmonton will back it.

Even with her husband’s long-term future unannounced at the time of our interview, Kyle McDavid insists her investment in Edmonton isn’t contingent on where the Oilers captain ends up. “I love this city regardless of whether we’re here.” She pauses. “I would have done it regardless. People have multiple businesses all over the world.”