Fogo Island is the largest in a chain located off the shore of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Only 100 square miles and home to just 2,700 residents, the enclave also houses Fogo Island Inn, helmed by self-proclaimed innkeeper, Zita Cobb. Cobb was born and raised on the island before pursuing a (very successful) career in business and technology, returning in her early retirement to establish the Shorefast Foundation with her brothers. The charitable foundation is designed to strengthen the island community, which was faltering, in part due to decades of overfishing that decimated the island’s once-thriving industry. The foundation, with its model for “economic and cultural resilience,” which Cobb says can be implemented in small communities located anywhere, has established Fogo Island Arts, which fosters contemporary local artists; a micro-lending program for residents; and of course, the stunning 29-room Fogo Island Inn, which opened last year. Here, Cobb talks with Glenn Pushelberg, who, with George Yabu, had recently heard her speak at a Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR) luncheon in Toronto, which left them wanting to know more about the inn and Cobb’s unique ideas on sustainability, community, and hospitality.
What inspired you to create Fogo Island Inn?
I say this sentence so many times and I never get bored with it: The most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing. Place is the most important thing. Because if we all optimize for place—and I mean natural place, geography—then this big, wicked, tangly problem of sustainability that we can’t quite figure out would actually solve itself. We live in a society that, for the most part, optimizes for a return on capital. And so if we stop doing that, which we could do, we just have to decide. It turns out that people actually have to live in a place. Communities are attached to place. I mean community in the sense of people who understand that we actually have a shared fate, not a shared interest in a Subaru. Then, as business people, or as governments, or as individuals, we would make decisions that are in the best interest of place. And if we do that, the kind of ecological, cultural, social forms of destruction that we seem to be on a path for would stop.
How does that relate to Fogo Island?
What’s so special about it is that it’s specific. Human joy comes from the delightful little specific details in our everyday lives. Not from the generic. Yet, we’re very busily creating little factories of flattening, and Fogo Island hasn’t been flattened. It’s very specific. And of course I love that place.
I’m a business person by instinct, and Fogo Island has suffered the fate of many, if not most, rural communities not just in Canada but around the world, where they’re slowly having all the good sucked out of them, because it is not in the interest of globalized capital to wake up in the morning and say, ‘What the heck are we going to do about Fogo Island?’ Nobody in the FedEx company thinks, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen on these poor people on Fogo Island who are trying to start a furniture business and we don’t pick up there?’ It’s just not the way the world works. But I think it’s the way the world can work and should work.
So I care about Fogo Island, that’s the main motivation. I’m a busy person by design. When I had finished with my technology career I became very aware that there was not a big line of people with the love or the means to do something to make a difference on Fogo Island. The lucky thing is we still have a fishery where many rural communities in Newfoundland have lost their fisheries altogether. All I needed to figure out was how to grow another leg on the economy to complement the fishery. And I know that tourism is a dance with the devil.
Why do you say that?
You need to be super careful about scale, right? You need to be super careful about local ownership and all these things that create a hospitality experience that’s good for the guest and good for the host. And I think that is possible. Our duty as hosts is to offer them ways that this can happen in a meaningful way that’s dignified for both the visitor and the persons they’re visiting with.
How do you do that?
We have something that is called, because I can’t think of a better name, a community host program. There are about 30 people on the island who welcome guests when they come. So if you come and stay at the inn, we’ll give you the choice—actually included in your rate at the inn—that you will be introduced to a local person. This is not a staff member of the inn, but the inn does compensate them. We just had a retired fishery officer sign up, and he has a very different perspective on the island. We make the introduction, and then you figure out with that person: how much time you want to spend together, what you want to do, do you want to go on a boat, do you want to catch a fish, are you interested in furniture or textiles? The lucky thing for us in starting an inn is that Fogo Islanders are really deeply, genetically, and culturally predisposed to hospitality.
So why create Fogo Island Inn’s modernist architecture? Why not vernacular architecture?
This is so important. It’s about identity, and it’s about finding ways to carry the past with us, at least some of the knowledge of the past, without being trapped in a museum. One of the things about rural people that is not well understood sometimes is that because they’re rural doesn’t mean they’re backwards. On Fogo Island we always felt like very contemporary people. And we still see ourselves as contemporary people, and we understand that if we’re going to survive, then we have to be relevant in the world, and if we’re going to be relevant in the world, we have to have something of interest to share with the world or to say or to contribute. If all we ever do is copy stuff that people built in 1820, all we’re saying to the world is we actually have no new ideas and we’re just going to repeat. I actually find copies of things to be slightly offensive, unless there’s a good reason to copy.
The design brief we gave to the architect, Todd Saunders, was really simple. We said, ‘You need to find a way to express in contemporary architecture what we have learned in 400 years of clinging to this rock.’
How did he do that?
He’s done it brilliantly. Not just in use of materials, but the construction techniques. If you talk to the guys that built the inn or built the [on site] artist studios, the first thing they’ll tell you is this is not a construction project. This is a crafts project. It’s built board by board by board. And of course, it uses our local woods. The inn is a 40,000-square-foot building. It’s got a steel frame, but every turn in that building, and of course on the inside, feels very different than it presents from a distance.
How did you choose Todd Saunders?
I really wanted to hire a Newfoundlander 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 Newfoundler would carry that burden much more heavy 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. I went to Norway to look at some of his other work.
I phoned his cell phone 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 actually build these studios that were off the grid, so 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 just 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 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 am 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 them 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, but what I’m actually really interested in—I once made a presentation of Newfoundland government and the title of my presentation 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 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 ever 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. Really it isn’t about the money. Money is not a sacred thing.
Where did your drive come from?
I think it’s just a unique combination of having been born at the time I was born, which really was in the 19th century, when you think about what Fogo Island was 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 over-fishing 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. It’s my generation, 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 and all of this—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 no synthetic in the Fogo Island Inn, except for the 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.
