IT’S NOT A TYPICAL START to a design-hotel stay:
a ride in a silver Hyundai with a sweater-clad sep-
tuagenarian stranger named Blanche. But when
guests arrive at Fogo Island Inn, the starkly modern
hotel in the rugged northeastern Atlantic, they
begin by going on an orientation drive with a local.
Blanche’s soft, Irish twang prompts me to ask when
she moved to this community in Newfoundland
and Labrador of only a few hundred. She explains
that her family arrived six generations before,
lured by waters solid with cod. Drastic overfishing
three decades ago saw the cod industry evaporate,
prompting another resident, Zita Cobb, born the
sixth of seven children to an illiterate fisherman, to
seek a creative way to invigorate their economy. In
2006, Cobb created the arts-supporting Shorefast
Foundation. It helped that Cobb, unlike her neigh-
bors, had retired in her 40s from a career in fiber-
optics finance as one of the wealthiest women in
Canada. The charity’s angular artist studios have
since hosted painters, filmmakers, and sculptors as
artists in residence; but philanthropy is not sustain-
able. So Cobb enlisted architect Todd Saunders to
help design Fogo Island Inn, the timber-clad 29-suite
hotel and restaurant on stilts that opened in 2013.
Boatbuilders were redeployed as furniture makers,
quilters applied their skills to for-purchase contem-
porary crafts, and the menu alchemized ingredients
such as cod cheek and dandelion into a nouvelle
Labrador cuisine. Fogo now lures luxury travelers
to an otherwise unsung corner of the world. When
I recount my time spent there, it’s not the boat trip
In Praise
of a
Pioneer
After nearly
a decade,
Canada’s Fogo
Island Inn
is still
championing
its neighbors
58 CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER APRIL 2020
why we travel^ ➤^ spotlight
