Edmonton Oilers Captain’s Wife Lauren Kyle McDavid Is All Business

While Connor McDavid skates circles around opponents as one of the top players in the National Hockey League, his wife Lauren Kyle McDavid is on a mission to share her style sensibilities in their home market of Edmonton.

Kyle’s latest venture is a furniture showroom, Trove Living, which opened this spring. The space also houses the offices of her interior design company, Kyle & Co, and an intimate gathering space, Bar Trove.

“I’ve always wanted to have a brick and mortar,” Kyle said last week, just days after McDavid’s Edmonton Oilers fell to the Florida Panthers in the 2025 Stanley Cup Final. “I feel like everything that I work on with clients, it was kind of behind the scenes. I wanted the general public to experience something that I created, so it was really inspired by my ethos and I think that’s where Trove Living was a natural extension from our design firm.”

Once she settled on the historic Canada Permanent building in downtown Edmonton, the renovation brought her vision to life.

“The building itself, I think, really set a precedent for what I was doing,” she said. “We had so much space in that building — it’s, like, 9,000 square feet. So moving the design firm made sense. Then we had so much extra space and we were like, ‘It would be nice to have somewhere where people can go.’ Maybe do a little shopping for a small gift, and then they can go have lunch. Or they’re coming from a meeting at our office and we can get them a reservation downstairs. It just made sense. And myself, as a person — I love hosting. I love making people feel good. I love cooking. So it it was a natural extension of that as well.”

While rumors swirl about whether or not McDavid will sign a contract extension with the Oilers after he becomes eligible on July 1, his wife is putting down strong roots in the city with her many ventures.

After meeting McDavid as a 19-year-old in 2016, the interior design student at what is now known as Toronto Metropolitan University used her education to design the couple’s Edmonton home, which was featured in a 2021 spread in Architectural Digest.

As it turns out, the collarbone injury that cost McDavid 37 games in his rookie season in 2015-16 came with a silver lining. While he was out of action and going through rehab, McDavid’s NHL housemate Luke Gazdic happened to be dating Kyle’s cousin.

“One night on FaceTime, Connor was in the background and was like, ‘Do you have anyone you can set me up with?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, my cousin. You might really like her.’ They set us up on, I would say, a blind-ish date in Toronto, and that’s how we met.”

The relationship progressed quickly.

“We had gone on a dinner date. We saw each other next day, and then the timing worked out that he was rehabbing in Edmonton and I had a break from school so I was like, ‘I’ll come visit you,’” she recalled. “After our first date, it felt like we had known each other for 10 years.”

Now they have. She has been by McDavid’s side for all five of his scoring titles and his three Hart Trophies as NHL MVP (2017, 2021, 2023).

Kyle made the move from Toronto to Edmonton after finishing school in 2019, and launched Kyle & Co soon after. And in the summer of 2024, the couple was married in a stunning ceremony in Ontario’s cottage country that earned feature treatment in Australian Vogue.

More weddings are on the agenda this summer. McDavid’s older brother, Cameron is getting married, and McDavid’s Oilers teammate, Leon Draisaitl, is marrying actress Celeste Desjardins — a close friend of Kyle’s since their high-school days in Sudbury, Ont.

Kyle made that introduction, and believes the relationship has strengthened the bond between the Oilers’ two best players. Last September, Draisaitl signed his own eight-year extension to stay in Edmonton.

“I know that they have their own friendship, but I think it’s also because we have such a close friendship that they’ve gotten really close,” she said. “It’s a dream to have your best friend on the team here, and they get along so well. You can’t ask for anything better than that.”

Kyle, Desjardins and Oilers defenseman Mattias Ekholm’s wife, Ida Bjornstad, also serve on the board of the Edmonton Oilers Community Foundation, which has long supported vulnerable residents in the region and delivered youth hockey opportunities to under-represented groups.

Earlier this year, Kyle also launched her new clothing brand, Sports Club Atelier. The premium sportswear label offers elevated unisex designs in limited-edition drops.

The brand was born from Kyle’s involvement in designing the playoff jackets for the Oilers’ wives and girlfriends.

“I’m not a graphic designer, but I was starting to learn how to use my programs from back in school and generate designs,” she said. “I was starting to work with manufacturers, so I had a little bit of knowledge, and then it just made sense to start the collection. I really saw a gap in the market.”

Early signs suggest that her intuition was correct.

“I don’t see it being NHL, or just hockey,” she said. “There’s a lot of opportunity with the brand.”

So far, Sports Club Atelier has dropped two limited-edition collections of Oilers apparel. Several other NHL teams are coming on board this fall, and the company is also collaborating with Canadian Finals Rodeo, which will take place in Edmonton in early October.

Perhaps the biggest news is a collaboration with Team Canada ahead of next February’s 2026 Winter Olympics.

“The intention is to have a wide variety of offerings for people going to the Olympics and supporting Team Canada next year,” she said. “And we’re going to be in major retailers. We’re chatting with major retailers right now for Team Canada stuff.”

Though she hadn’t started out looking to work in fashion, the field had always been of interest.

“I think, when you’re creative, you’re interested in everything that that inspires you creatively,” she said. “For me, I look at fashion to inspire my interiors, everything overlaps each other. So it’s natural that I would be interested in art, fashion. Anything that gets my creative mind going.”

Kyle’s efforts have been fully supported by her husband. In fact, McDavid made a game-changing gesture early on when he gifted his then-girlfriend with some business-coach sessions for her birthday.

“I’ve been working with her for four years now,” Kyle said. “We meet three times a month, and I don’t think I could open this many businesses without her guidance. I think there’s a way of thinking that you need to develop when you’re an entrepreneur. I’m a creative — I’m not a business mind first. So I need to train myself in how to build teams properly and how to set myself up for success and to constantly drive myself forward. I wouldn’t be here, for sure, without her.”

She sees parallels between her ventures and McDavid’s quest to win the Stanley Cup and, next February, Olympic gold.

“We both have dreams that we’re chasing, and we can relate around that,” she said. “We both know how we need to show up for each other in those moments and how we need to support each other in order to reach our goals. It’s really important to have a partner like that, who does understand and does provide support, because you need all the support you can get when he’s grinding through the playoffs and I’m grinding through opening businesses.”

Just as NHL players use their summers to train and come back stronger than ever when hockey returns in the fall, Kyle will be working remotely for much of the off-season, checking in with her teams at Trove Living and Bar Trove and moving the fashion line forward.

Her plate may look full, but Lauren Kyle McDavid is just getting started.