The five-year fight to bring Franco Cozzo back to Brunswick – and his parting advice to his daughters

Behind the blacked-out windows of 466 Sydney Road, four sisters are busy sorting through scores of furniture catalogues, old stock and a lifetime of memories, fully focused on their mission to fulfil a promise to their late father.

For five years, the heavy wooden frames of Franco Cozzo’s signature baroque furniture waited in the dark, a silent time capsule of a moment in Melbourne’s multicultural past.

Lisa Cozzo remembers pulling at her father’s trouser legs as a toddler while he chatted to and charmed customers.

Now back in the showroom as adults, Lisa and her sisters Angelina, Diana and Alessia intend to turn the lights back on, with more than just the furniture that has been sitting in the dark.

The sisters plan to get new Italian dining and living room pieces and breathe life back into the shop, as their father, Franco, had always hoped.

“When we walk in here, we feel a sense of dad, a sense of home, we feel comfort, so it was very important we do this,” Alessia said.

The Cozzo sisters say they took their first steps in the Brunswick showroom; later, they worked there as teens. Sometimes, they even joined their father on trips to Milan to meet furniture dealers.

“We’d go on the conference lunches, and Dad always pushed us first, like ‘These are my daughters’,” Lisa remembered.

So when the sisters re-entered the furniture business, they found that they still had a relationship with many of the dealers.

Franco Cozzo had a specific wish for his four successors (he had 10 children) to fulfil when reopening.

“He said to us: ‘Make sure you stick to the Italian – to my style of furniture’,” Lisa recalls.

The four sisters regularly notice phones on selfie sticks poking through the one clear window above their door, and they’re confident this interest will translate into customers when they open.

“People are saying ‘I want a piece of baroque furniture, I need a piece of Franco Cozzo’,” said Diana. “It’s really nice.”

The showroom is set to reopen on Saturday, September 19. A special tribute to Franco taking up an entire wall – currently shielded by a blue sheet – will be unveiled that day, joining the enormous mural of him on a wall of his former Footscray showroom.

Franco Cozzo opened his first store in Victoria Street, North Melbourne in 1959, after several years selling whitegoods door-to-door.

In 1968, he expanded to the huge three-storey showroom on Hopkins Street, Footscray, which closed in 2018 is now a wild west-themed craft brewery.

He then closed the North Melbourne store in 1985 to open the larger Brunswick site. The North Melbourne site is now a record store.

In 2014, Franco told this masthead he had no plans to close the Brunswick store, but that its long-term future would depend on how Australia’s economy fared over the next few years.

At one stage, he planned to turn it into an apartment tower and restaurant for Angelina to run, but the store ultimately closed during COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne.

The family always meant to reopen the store, but water damage in the roof and the move from Footscray slowed down their efforts.

Then, in December 2023, the furniture king died, aged 88, and the family took the time they needed to grieve their beloved patriarch.

“About four months ago, we thought: ‘It’s time. We’re ready,’” Angelina said.

But even then, re-opening has been a struggle. In June, a ceiling pipe burst, damaging the ceiling. In August, another pipe burst in the alleyway next to the building, near the fuse box.

“There was water inside, water outside … it was ridiculous,” Lisa recalled. The reopening, initially planned for July, was postponed. Again.

The four Cozzos say restarting a furniture business was overwhelming to begin with.

“We didn’t understand how actually how much went on, and how much [Franco] took on all the responsibility,” Lisa said.

Now, they say, they try to evoke his work ethic and push through, even when hit with obstacle after obstacle.

“Cars were always going through the window at Footscray – that intersection wasn’t all that safe,” said Alessia.

“Then the cops would come, and you’d have to figure out how to block the window, but he always found a way to fix it.”

As the sisters stand on the precipice of fulfilling their promise to Franco, Alessia said all they wanted was to keep it going.

“I’d want our kids to continue it, and I feel like there would be a lot of them!”

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