Simply stylish

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This article was published 12/06/2022 (1349 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re asking Danielle Cyr about the best month of the year to live in Winnipeg, she’ll tell you with great certainty it’s June, when daytime highs aren’t as stifling as they are in July, and when you can still nurse a cool one on a patio till 10 p.m., before it gets too dark or mosquito-y, the way it does in August.

Admittedly, the married mother of two is rather biased. First of all, her birthday falls during the sixth month of the year, on this story’s publication date, as a matter of fact. Second, June Home Supply, 250 Kennedy St., is the tag she and her husband Joël settled on four years ago for their stylish home decor store, oft-described as “Instagram-worthy” owing to a host of items customers say they don’t necessarily need, but, once they’ve seen them, can’t imagine living without.

“We tossed around quite a few names when we were trying to figure out what to call ourselves and kept coming back to June,” says Joël, seated next to Danielle in Thom Bargen, the Graham Avenue coffee shop that shares an interior passageway with their premises.

“Not only is June Danielle’s favourite month of the year, it’s also when the city seems to come back to life,” he continues, taking a sip of his Americano. “Plus, it’s a word that has a nice ring to it, and looks good written out, which isn’t always the case, right?” (Right! Here’s looking at you “moist.”)

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If there was anybody predestined to run a fashionable urban boutique carrying everything from iron watering cans to ceramic serving bowls to wooden deck chairs, it’s Danielle.

Among her favourite childhood memories are trips to the now-closed downtown Bay store where, following a bite at the Paddlewheel restaurant, her parents would allow her to romp around the sixth-floor furniture department or, as she puts it, “this magical, cosy wonderland.”

She chuckles, saying her mom and dad, who live next door to her and Joël on the very street she grew up on, probably still regret letting her choose the paint colour for her bedroom at age 10, which turned out to be the “brightest, glossiest” shade of lime green money could buy. (Don’t even get her started on how much she loved curling up with the new Ikea catalogue as a 12-year-old, long before the Scandinavian juggernaut opened an outlet in Winnipeg.)

In October 2002, Danielle, by then a Grade 11 student at Collège Louis Riel, attended a battle-of-the-bands competition held near her school. One of the groups participating that evening was a Prince Albert, Sask.-based, francophone outfit called O-U-BA, featuring Joël on drums. The two were introduced to one another at an afterparty. They exchanged email addresses before saying good night.

Joël, who later that evening told his bandmates he’d met the gal he was going to marry, began messaging her the second he returned to Saskatchewan, and continued doing so for a number of weeks, despite not receiving a single reply.

“My thinking was, he lives eight hours away, I’m probably never going to see him again for the rest of my life, so why bother answering?” Danielle says, reaching over to grab his hand when he stares down, feigning a pout.

As luck would have it, he and his bandmates returned to Winnipeg five months later, to play a series of shows at Festival du Voyageur. After spotting a poster listing O-U-BA as one of the acts on the bill, Danielle purchased a ticket. The pair reconnected following the performance and spent the next six days getting to know each other better before he headed back west.

They continued to stay in touch for the next 16 months, firing letters back and forth, long, handwritten missives each has kept to this day. Danielle flew to Prince Albert in June 2004 to be Joël’s date at his Grade 12 grad celebration. Three days later, he hopped in his four-door 1992 Nissan Sentra and moved to Winnipeg permanently.

Joël, a Red Seal chef, worked in the hospitality industry for the next 10 years, around playing in bands at night. Danielle, who attended St. Boniface University following Grade 12, got a position as an education assistant with a Winnipeg school division, but left that job to become a full-time mom after the birth of their first child in 2010.

By the time they became parents for the second time, Joël was averaging between 70 and 80 hours per week at work. He enjoyed the challenges that came with developing menus and such, but with two young ones at home, he and Danielle agreed that lifestyle wouldn’t be sustainable in the long run.

“Joël and I had always talked about having a business of our own, so it was at that point we started having serious discussions about what that might look like,” Danielle says.

“We wanted to be in control of our time, and wanted to invest in ourselves, so to speak,” Joël pipes in. “We evaluated our strengths; she’s always had a keen eye for beautiful things and, from working in restaurants, I felt I had an aptitude for business. After a bit of research, we thought an e-commerce site was our best bet, so Danielle started hunting for unique goods we could sell and I stuck to the behind-the-scene stuff.”

The couple established Mür Lifestyle, mur being the French word for ripe, out of the basement of their 1,000-square-foot St. Boniface home in 2014. Billed as “quality goods for simple living,” Mür started off “very grassroots,” Danielle remarks, with just a handful of items — towels, blankets, a few cleaning products — available for purchase.

They haven’t looked back much since. They moved their operation to a sixth-floor space in the Exchange District the following year, after outgrowing their basement, then to their current location on Kennedy Street three years after that. The second move coincided with them changing their name to June, simply because so many people seemed to have trouble pronouncing Mür. (Mir, moor, mirror: they heard it said every which way, they laugh.)

“We always figured a retail location would be on the table at some point, but the timing was never right. Or the location was wrong or the rent too high,” Joël goes on, pointing out the bulk of their business, probably 75 per cent, comes from online sales to people from outside the province.

Funnily enough, a lot of Winnipeggers who order through the website (junehomesupply.com) don’t even realize June is in their own backyard. He’ll let them know the store is located downtown if they want to pick up instead — that generally results in another purchase or two when they arrive and are able to poke through the shelves in person.

Soumela Krystik guesses it was early 2015 when she discovered the Cyrs’ business on Instagram, when they were still set up in their home. She was instantly drawn to the “natural esthetic and simple design” of their offerings, and was thrilled to discover Mür was locally owned.

“My earliest purchases included some blankets, a wooden cake plate and a market basket backpack (handmade in Morocco with dried palm leaves), all of which I still use regularly,” Krystik says, adding friends of hers have also become June customers after spotting things she scooped up there in various rooms of her house.

“Over the years Danielle has curated the perfect home pieces that are both lovely and functional and, honestly, hard to resist. She truly has an eye for beautiful pieces that encourage slow living.”

Danielle smiles, saying it’s probably a good thing her abode is on the smaller side, thus preventing her from taking her work home with her on a continual basis.

“I obviously love everything I order in so, yeah, if we had the room, I could definitely find a spot for each and every piece we sell,” she says, noting they’re just now putting the finishing touches on self-designed merchandise: linen products such as tea towels, napkins and tablecloths made of flax.

As for their kids, well, the apples don’t fall far from the tree, it would appear. Like his dad, their son is already an ace drummer, and as for their daughter, 9…

“I can definitely see a lime green — or hot pink — bedroom wall in her future,” Danielle says, laughing heartily. “She definitely has a style all her own, there’s no doubt about that.”

David Sanderson writes about Winnipeg-centric restaurants and businesses.

david.sanderson@winnipegfreepress.com