Architects often treat historic preservation as one enterprise and contemporary design as another. Old things should look old, the thinking goes, and new things should look new. But at the Montauk Sofa furniture showroom in Montreal, the family-run Winnipeg- and Montreal-based firm of Cohlmeyer Architecture has quietly blurred the lines between old and new, creating a work of architecture that will satisfy neither ardent preservationists nor fans of sleek contemporary design—and is all the better for it. Built entirely within the shell of a 1940s-era factory along bustling Boulevard Saint-Laurent, the 17,000-square-foot showroom beckons visitors through a choreographed sequence of spaces—some newly built, some renovated, some preserved—that together turn a thoroughly ordinary building into a rich composition of layered histories.