Hospitality Design - November 2014 - 74

perspectives

interview zita cobb
4. Quilts and furniture in
the suites were crafted by
Fogo Islanders.

I'm really interested in is finding a way to extract
the learnings, the model, and toolkit from this
kind of community development project that
can be used by other small places. Maybe not
every community's conclusion is we should build
an inn; maybe not every small community has
access to capital that Fogo Island has had because
of the unique circumstances of my life. But that's
not the important thing. It isn't about the money.
Money is not a sacred thing.

Where did your drive come from?

4
because I wanted to hire someone who felt
the same duty and responsibility, and had the
same terror I had about getting it wrong. I felt a
Newfoundlander would carry that burden much
heavier than anyone else because his ancestors
are watching him, too. That narrowed the field
quite a lot. I happened to see one of Todd's houses
in Norway in Air Canada magazine. Then, I went
to Norway to look at some of his other work.
I phoned him and said, 'I'm calling from
Newfoundland about a project.' He stopped and
said very quickly, 'I've been waiting a long time
for this call.' It's his first project at home.

Can you give me the rundown of the
program?

None of us had ever done anything like this
before. Todd's never designed a hotel or anything
remotely like it. And I'm a bean counter. So this
was really [done by] novices.
The inn really belongs to Fogo Islanders-
it's a community-owned asset. But Shorefast's
first initiative was something called Fogo Island
Arts, which operates this residency program for
contemporary artists. We needed workspaces
for the artists. We started with that because
we knew we had a pretty steep learning curve
about how to build these studios that were off the
grid: We collect rainwater, we have solar panels,
wood-fired heat, composting toilets, all of this
stuff for these little studios. And these are just
workspaces.
We learned a lot about how to get supplies
because we also set business-related rules. We
wouldn't source things from any jurisdiction
that didn't have basic labor laws and basic
environmental protection laws. Wherever
possible, we would make everything on

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Fogo Island, and if not Fogo Island, then
Newfoundland, and if not Newfoundland, then
Canada, and if not Canada, then the U.S. There
were a lot of things to work out. In a way, the
studios allowed us to solve some of these issues at
a much smaller scale before we tackled the inn.

How many rooms in the hotel?

There are 29. And I'm not kidding when I tell you
there was going to be 30, but we realized we didn't
have linen closets. When we were proposing
this project, Danny Williams was premier then.
He looked at the whole thing and said-he's a
business guy-'Why so few rooms? Why don't
you put 300 rooms up?' And I jokingly said, but I
was dead serious about it, 'We're 2,706 people. We
can only love so many people at a time.' So-called
sustainable tourism is only possible if you get the
scale right.

Is it ﬁnancially sustainable?

Yes, of course. When I looked at all the remote
properties around the world, and talked to as
many of [the owners] as I could, my learning
was it takes them five years or so-and some
say seven-to build their guest base and their
business to the point that it starts to sustain itself.
Our business plan calls for us to get there in three
years. We've just finished a year, and we are quite
a bit ahead of pace.

Would you ever grow this beyond Fogo
Island?

Yes. I once made a presentation to the
Newfoundland government and the title was,
'This Is Not an Inn on Fogo Island.' That isn't
what the project is. That is a manifestation of
some ideas and dreams and ambitions, but what

It's a combination of having been born at the time
I was born, which really was in the 19th century.
If you think about what Fogo Island was then for
the first 10 years of my life-no TV, no running
water, no electricity, nothing that we all take for
granted. I saw the worst destruction of the 20th
century, when the overfishing came up against
our shores. I saw my own father die of a broken
heart because of the fishery collapse, and I'm an
eighth-generation Fogo Islander. My generation
was the first one that the bond with the sea was
broken.
I'm a finance person but my career was in
technology. I did a lot of acquisitions around
the world. And the more I traveled and could
see what capital was doing-you just need to
go to China and buy some companies to see
the destruction of communities-you see the
destruction of people's souls.

Do you consider yourself an innkeeper?

I do. Very much so. And every person who works
at the Fogo Island Inn says we're all innkeepers.
Which is true. When we were working on the
design for the inn-whether it's what bed and
where is the bed going to be placed in the room-
we focused, painfully so, on every experience that
the guest would have in that space.
We wanted to make sure that at the very least,
that the people who would come and stay with
us would have what the cavemen had. All the
materials they touch are natural materials. There
is absolutely nothing synthetic in the Fogo Island
Inn, except for the telephone set. And even that,
I debated whether we should even have it. But
the guys up in the shop tell me they can make a
wooden one.
We just try to be thoughtful about people's
needs and balance that with the needs of the
community. We're not doing crazy things that will
be hurtful to the place, culturally or ecologically,
in the interest of some fake form of luxury. hd
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