Why the Most Personal Interiors Begin With History, not a Mood Board
Along Edmonton’s 149th Street, Circa Home is doing something altogether different from your average furniture showroom. It is not simply a place to source pieces for a room. It is, in the words of co-founder Trevor Compton, a collection of past, present, and future — and the moment you step through the door, that philosophy becomes immediately apparent.
Those doors, as it happens, are worth pausing over. Standing eleven feet tall, with hand-etched glass panels, they once graced a Parisian hotel in the 1800s. Generations of guests passed through them — travellers, romantics, dreamers — before they crossed an ocean and a continent to find their place at Circa Home. They did not arrive by accident. They arrived because this is exactly the kind of object Trevor, Laurie, and Sherri seek out: one that carries history in its grain, and sets a tone before a single word is spoken.
On any given day, you might walk in and find yourself in the middle of a room where an antique roll-top desk faces a contemporary upholstered armchair, where a hand-carved mantelpiece anchors a tableau of taper candles and sculptural ironwork, where zebra-print ottomans encircle a tufted velvet centrepiece crowned with an ornate cast-iron urn and fresh orchids overhead. “Every decade has redeeming qualities and style when you begin to dig into images and handle all the goodies from the past,” Trevor said. “We get the luxury to dabble and use and admire all these things today. What an honour.”
Every corner has been considered, every vignette composed with the kind of deliberate layering that takes decades of eye and instinct to achieve. That instinct belongs to three people who have built something genuinely rare in just two months of operation: a design studio grounded in collaboration, mutual respect, and a shared belief that the objects in your home should tell your story.
Trevor’s love of antiques began at age nine, when he attended a farm auction with his parents and walked away with an 1860s Russian brass bed — purchased with money earned collecting bottles. That early fascination evolved into a career spanning visual display work for Eaton’s,
Holt Renfrew, Harry Rosen, and others, and eventually into the founding vision behind
Circa Home: that theatre, provocation, and beauty belong together on the same floor.
Laurie Murphy brings more than 35 years of interior design experience to the partnership, with a portfolio spanning new builds, large-scale renovations, and considered transformations across Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Victoria. Her background as a visual artist, combined with a deep knowledge of Feng Shui, gives her work a quality that is both refined and intuitive.
“I love when I can collaborate with my client throughout the process,” she explained. “It allows me to build the relationship and empowers them with the choices they make.”
Sherri Schmidt rounds out the trio with a perspective rooted in the relationship between people and their spaces. A graduate of the University of Alberta’s Residential Interiors Program, with specialties in Building Construction and Green Design, Sherri approaches every project by asking what chord a client wants their home to strike. Her process is thorough and deeply personal — covering everything from how a family lives day to day, to whether they entertain, to any sensitivities that might shape material choices.
What Circa Home has cultivated in its opening months extends beyond interior design consultations and custom furniture sourcing. The store has already become a gathering place — a venue that draws Edmonton’s design community together around a shared appreciation for craft, beauty, and objects with genuine provenance. “The end goal is for the client to smile, exhale, and feel like they’re finally home,” Sherri shared. “I’ve never made two spaces look alike.”
That warmth is not incidental. It is built into the way Trevor, Laurie, and Sherri operate every day. Open Tuesday through Saturday, and available by appointment for focused, one-on-one consultations, Circa Home invites you to take your time. To linger over a piece. To imagine it not on a showroom floor but in the room where your life actually happens.
Your home deserves that kind of consideration. And so do you.