Although the Museum Quarter obviously owes its name to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, you need only take a moment to admire the superb facades of its row houses and the rich architecture of each street to realize that the entire Quarter is something of a museum. These beautiful residences, which draw their architectural roots from Italy, England and Scotland, began to appear in 1840 on approximately one square mile of land, where the country’s richest families built their homes. This was called the Golden Square Mile and the Museum Quarter is located at the heart of it.

Fashionable, elegant and refined, the Quarter owes its unique ambience to an appealing blend of French elegance and Anglo-Saxon charm. The Quarter is also home not only to such superb churches as Erskine & American United, whose windows are signed by the New York artist Louis C. Tiffany, but to Montreal’s very first apartment building, The Sherbrooke, erected in 1889 on the corner of Sherbrooke and Crescent streets.

The commercial character of the Museum Quarter took shape during the post-war years. First to appear were the prestigious galleries, antique dealers and jewellers. Then, in the 1960s, it became the place to be seen. Several fashion designers set up shop in the Quarter and a number of stylists and artists opened studios there. Rue de la Montagne was even immortalized in a song written by Stéphane Venne and sung by Renée Claude. A convivial and informal but refined atmosphere has endured from those years. The Quarter has also maintained its status as a place for the arts, as a tour of the more than one hundred boutiques and galleries will confirm. In its own, unique way, each of these establishments makes the Museum Quarter the preferred meeting place of epicureans from all walks of life, both from Montreal and abroad. We are delighted to count you among them.