High design meets the art of escape on the East coast | Canada Voices

Mist-covered mountains in Gros Morne National Park. Icebergs drifting by the rocky coast of Twillingate. Humpback whales leaping across the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Newfoundland’s natural beauty has long attracted tourists, who are coming to the island in greater numbers. There were 5 per cent more summertime visitors in 2025 than before the pandemic, and record entries to provincial parks.

New, high-design inns and guest houses add to the landscape’s appeal. Contemporary architecture and interiors give guests a special vantage point to appreciate the rugged coastline, doing so from an elegant bench, perhaps, or through a well-positioned picture window.

Newfoundland’s design has deep roots. St. John’s Jellybean Row, with its multihued homes – all the easier to see in the city’s dense fog – dates back to the Victorian era. While the Gander International Airport is famous as the backdrop for the musical Come From Away, the National Trust of Canada has also deemed it the country’s “most important modernist room.” Designed in the late 1950s by John M. Lyle & Associates, its mid-century furniture, art and terrazzo floors are still well preserved.

The current crop of design-focused stays, however, has a more recent inspiration: Fogo Island Inn, designed by Gander-born architect Todd Saunders. When entrepreneur Zita Cobb launched the hotel in 2013, her idea was to revive a corner of the province devastated by the decline in cod fishing. The distinct structure – white boxes jutting over a windswept, rocky shoreline – has been a luxury destination ever since, with notable guests including Gwyneth Paltrow and David Letterman.

The success has encouraged others. “Fogo showed what can happen when you augment Newfoundland’s beautiful landscape, its friendly people, with excellent design,” says interior designer Sarah Parker Charles.

Parker Charles was raised in St. John’s and worked in Montreal and Chicago before returning home to launch her own firm, Carvel & Helm, in 2014. With partner Nancy Sheppard, she designed the chic Hew & Draw in 2020, Corner Brook’s first new hotel in 30 years. Its rooms, with their crisp black accents, are a modern interpretation of the historic rail cars that once criss-crossed the island.

“Hospitality is continuing to grow,” she says. “We’ve got so many beautiful places to stay where even now it’s sometimes only possible to go with an RV or pitch a tent. But that’s changing.”

Here are three new design stays worth the trip.

The Cape Retreat

Cape Broyle, N.L. From $550 a night

At the Cape Retreat, six cube-shaped cabins dot a grassy hillside on the edge of Cape Broyle, a fishing village of around 500 people. From afar, the structures look a bit like giant building blocks left on the lawn. Inside, each has a king bed, a kitchenette and an ensuite bathroom.

None of the cabins have a television but instead include a small walnut box. Made by local carpenter Brendan Hanlon, each of the boxes contains a note encouraging visitors to put their phone inside and close the brass clasp. “The idea is that people come here to unplug,” says the Cape Retreat’s co-founder Dave Lank.

Lank, a travel journalist, moved to Newfoundland from Montreal in 2019. He came in part because he saw an opportunity to start a tourism venture of his own and in part because his wife, Lori Morgan, the photo editor for a travel magazine called Range, was from Newfoundland and wanted to go home.

Going phone free might be a bit redundant – Newfoundland has notoriously spotty cell reception and WiFi can be harder to find than snow in July. Regardless, going analog allows visitors to free up brain space and appreciate the surroundings.

At the Cape, architect Nick Herder, who previously worked under Todd Saunders on the design for the Fogo Island Inn, pointed each cabin in a slightly different direction so each captures a unique vista – the town, the harbour, down the cape and out to sea. Through expansive windows, the light is constantly changing, piercing the heavy clouds that often roll through. Sometimes it glints in the water as a crab boat approaches shore. Other times, it illuminates the area’s hills, glowing against a forest of scruffy pines.

It’s a woodsy, rustic place, which is reflected in the cabins themselves. They are clad in raw cedar planks on the outside, and lined with a mix of birch and spruce on the inside. “The spruce will mark over time,” says Lank. “To me, that’s okay. It’s character.”

The Retreat does not run a sit-down restaurant. Instead, the cabins are clustered around a central building, the Greene’s House, which has a common living and dining area where chef Alex Blagdon offers a mix of multi-course dinners and cooking classes every week.

Blagdon trained in Ireland, Italy and France and has worked in some of Newfoundland’s top restaurants, including the Merchant Tavern in St. John’s. She serves local ingredients – Newfoundland honey, foraged spruce tips – on custom pottery from CUP Studios in Twillingate. “The colours [of the pottery] all come from the landscape,” says Blagdon. “The blues of the sea, the green mosses.”

The Greene’s House, named for a family that once lived on the property, has a homey vibe, with a wood-burning fireplace and long birch bench made by St. Philip’s, N.L.-based carpenter Philip McIlroy. “Sometimes people come in and feel the need to take their shoes off,” says Blagdon. “In Newfoundland, we are in and out of each other’s houses so often it doesn’t make sense to take them off. It’s more comfortable, it also makes it easier for people to get to the next place they need to go.”

Murphy’s Cove Retreat

Norman’s Cove-Long Cove, N.L. $799 a night, with rentals starting in 2027

In Newfoundland vernacular, the word “pumbly” is used to describe round beach boulders. The stones are shaped over time by the weather, years of crashing waves and blowing winds.

Thousands of pumbly stones line the beach at Murphy’s Cove, a sequestered bay an hour west of St. John’s with placid waters in the summer and rough winds in the winter.

“When it’s cold the gales come from the north,” says Adam Steffler-Minty, a St. John’s resident who runs Sable Building and Design, one of Newfoundland’s largest contracting businesses. “They can be really ferocious.”

Steffler-Minty recently finished building the Murphy’s Cove Retreat, a three-bedroom guest house that that he will run for tourists starting in 2027. “The house is meant to connect people with nature,” says Steffler-Minty. “But it’s also meant to provide comfort and shelter. That’s the balance we were trying to strike.”

Architect Evan Hoyles designed Murphy’s Cove Retreat in collaboration with East Coast Modern, a company that offers modular homes that can be prefabricated in a factory and shipped to remote sites. Originally from Newfoundland, Hoyles left to study at Dalhousie University and worked in Halifax for five years before recently coming home and launching his own firm. “Fogo was just starting when I was a student but it was a big inspiration,” he says. “Newfoundland is a big driver of my work. I’m often inspired by the traditions here, and try to find a way to make them contemporary.”

To accommodate for the weather at Murphy’s Cove, Hoyles looked to the area’s time-worn fishing huts, which are often clad in cedar shingles. “Cedar shingles are durable, long-lasting and stand up to the pelting rain and wet snow,” he says. “They are also quite beautiful, especially as they turn silver over time.”

Hoyles laid out the house in an L-shape. The primary bedroom and the open-concept living space (including a kitchen, dining room and family area) are in the wing closest to the beach, with the guest quarters and a TV room in an adjoining section. Panoramic windows reveal sunrise vistas over the ocean and sunset views over a private grassy courtyard – a quiet place for kids to play.

When the windows are open, a gentle sea breeze wafts in, carrying the sound of lapping waves. It’s a peaceful, meditative way to spend an August afternoon. But when the winds pick up (which they do, even in the summer), the windows seal tight to block out the howling, almost haunting sound.

Throughout, there are plenty of places to wait out a storm. One of the most comfortable is a deep bench custom-built into a nook in the primary bedroom. Another bench is set in a niche off the front entryway, lined with a wallpaper by Bonavista, N.L.-based designer Kate Golding.

Called Forest Blooms, the pattern features fiddleheads, mosses and lilies. It echoes the intention of the house. “When I designed Forest Blooms,” explains Golding, “I wanted to capture not only the beauty of those woodland plants, but also the joy and optimism that spring brings after a long, hard winter.”

Dog Cove House

Port Rexton, N.L. From $900 a night

Dog Cove House sits at the head of the Skerwink hiking trail, a five-kilometre walking path wending around dramatic coastal cliffs. The historic town of Trinity, N.L. – church spires, clapboard homes, white picket fences – lies across a bay.

The house itself, which is composed of a four-bedroom main section and a neighbouring loft – both newly finished and available for rent – has huge windows framing the picturesque scenery. They brighten the walls of the primary bedroom, and soar up one side of a double-height sitting space.

On arrival, however, the views aren’t necessarily the first thing that stand out. It’s the home’s signature aroma, spritzed from a bottle of custom room spray.

Alder and Ox, a St. John’s company specializing in home scents, crafted the fragrance. It picks up on the sweetness in Newfoundland’s air, with notes of the wild mint that grows everywhere, as well as a certain freshness that’s hard to define (but is particularly welcome to someone coming from a congested, smoggy city).

The calming scent complement’s the home’s spa-like amenities – a cedar-lined sauna, a six-person hot tub, a steam shower – and the open, airy interiors – white walls accented by white oak millwork from high-end Italian brand Scavolini. (The rest of the house also impresses, including a coffee bar, a library and a TV den.)

“It’s a little bit Nordic,” says the designer, Susan Drover of SAM Design. “I take a lot of inspiration from travel. At the same time, I love Newfoundland. Every book in the library is from and about the province.”

Drover, an entrepreneur, worked for many years in finance before enrolling in a design college in St. John’s when she was 40. In addition to her interiors studio, she runs a retail furniture business as well as Dwell by Sam, where she designs and rents vacation properties.

“When I graduated university in 1990, there were no opportunities in Newfoundland,” she says. “I had to move to Toronto. But like a lot of people, I’ve come home. I’m so excited to see the growth here and the way design has helped enrich people’s experiences.”

Dwell by Sam rents eight properties in total, six of which are owned by Drover, two by other clients. Whereas Dog Cove has a crisp white palette, the original property, Dvele, which opened in St. John’s in 2023, is a dark, moody sage. “Dog Cove has views,” Drover says. “Dvele is in the middle of town. Instead of looking out, I wanted to create something cozy – a place to stay in.”

The writer was a guest of all featured properties, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.

Bring the look home

No time to visit? No problem. Newfoundland’s artisans offer items to admire the island’s style at home.

Bonavista-based wallpaper designer Kate Golding often takes her cues from Newfoundland’s natural scenery, including the icebergs that drift by the coast in the spring (a sample costs $9.15). “When you live here, the landscape isn’t just something you visit,” she says. “It is woven into everyday life.”

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Furniture maker and designer Philip McIlroy was inspired by old-fashioned Windsor chairs when designing the swoop-backed bench at the Cape Retreat. “I like to take traditional objects and make them new,” he says. “It’s made from birch, a common wood in central Newfoundland.” From $4,000.

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Dwell by Sam stocks body washes and shampoos from Bonavista-based company East Coast Glow, which also sells stylish, locally made accessories. Their live-edge soap dishes, for example, are made with reclaimed driftwood. $12.40.

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All the stoneware from CUP Studios is handmade in Twillingate. The mossy green of their chef’s table mugs ($45) reflects the verdant groundcover found on the island’s extensive moorlands.

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With the Straight Strip Quilts ($1,700), handmade on Fogo Island by local quilters, scraps of colourful fabric come together into a vibrant, smile-inducing pattern. Custom options offered.

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