The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
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Swoon-worthy design at Fogo Island Inn
ZITA COBB HAS an appropriately furniture-friendly metaphor for what she is doing: ‘Putting another leg on the economy.’ Cobb is a Canadian social entrepreneur who has revived the fortunes of her tiny island birthplace through a visionary blend of art, design and hospitality.
The 2,300 inhabitants of Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, are fishing people descended from Irish and English settlers. Following the collapse of the cod industry in the early 1990s, many islanders moved to other parts of Canada, leaving behind an increasingly moribund community. Then, in 2013, Cobb opened an unashamedly exclusive 29-room hotel on the island, using the fortune she had made as an executive in California’s fibre-optics industry.
The inn is a sleek, modernist masterpiece by the Newfoundland-born, Norway-based architect Todd Saunders, and perches above the ocean on stilts, echoing the island’s old fishing ‘stages’. Cobb has filled the light interiors with contemporary furniture, inspired by traditional designs, staffed it with locals and ploughed all the profits back into the community through her charitable Shorefast Foundation. The result is a model of sustainable, place-specific enterprise that has revitalised the island.
Cobb, 59, quotes from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard when explaining the dynamic of this success: ‘If you want things to stay the same, things have to change.’ And design has been central to her mission.
‘You can’t make a contemporary inn and put in it copies of chairs that were made in 1850’
Cobb was in the UK for the London Design Festival last September and gave a lecture at the V&A about the furniture collection at the inn, which is now for sale online and (in the case of one of the chairs) at London’s SCP. The inn’s decor is inspired by Newfoundland’s traditional ‘outport’ furniture (outport being the name for the island’s fishing communities), which was plain and functional, with the occasional frivolous flourish.
‘These were all handmade pieces,’ she says. ‘No two were the same and everybody’s house was slightly different [when I was growing up] because there were different dads, different tables, different dads, different chairs.’ Cobb’s dilemma was how to reflect this tradition because ‘you can’t make a contemporary inn and put in it copies of chairs that were made in 1850’.
Her solution was to bring in designers ‘from away’, as she describes the world beyond Fogo Island. Cobb invited leading designers from Canada, the US, Scandinavia and London to visit the island, immerse themselves in the culture and produce furniture and textile designs based on what they saw and felt.
The ‘guardian angel’ of this process
was interior designer Ilse Crawford. ‘There was the desire on Zita’s part to develop the ongoing story of the island from a design perspective,’ Crawford explains. ‘So we put together a list of designers we felt could tell that story, including Simon Jones, Nina Tolstrup, Ineke Hans and Donna Wilson.’
They were then paired with craftspeople who manufactured their designs using local materials and techniques. ‘It took the people coming with those “away eyes”, to see us, see what we had and help us understand that this is very specific and not everybody in the world has it,’ says Cobb.
Donna Wilson, who is Scottish and has spent time in remote fishing communities in Scotland, said she felt an immediate affinity with the place and the project. ‘We were invested in it from the beginning. We wanted it to succeed and be amazing,’ she says. ‘All the people we met were like a big family and we felt part of the whole thing.’
Wilson cited her Bertha chair as an example of the process. Its inspiration is ‘the interiors of some of the buildings with tongue and groove on the walls’, while the design for the lambswool cover is an echo of the ‘scalloped and zigzag shingles’ on Brett House, in the settlement quaintly named Joe Batt’s Arm – after a man thought to have been one of Fogo Island’s first European settlers.
Shorefast started selling the furniture in response to requests from guests. It’s currently a modest enterprise, turning over less than half a mil-
‘This furniture puts you in a relationship with English people who went off to Newfoundland’
lion Canadian dollars a year, but these are early days. ‘I’d love to see it grow to a couple of million – that would be enough to support 20 woodworkers on Fogo Island,’ says Cobb, who attaches to each sale an innovative ‘Economic Nutrition’ label, based on food labelling, so that you can see where your money goes. This breaks the cost down into ‘ingredients’ such as labour, direct materials, design and production, sales and marketing, and profit, which is generally around 15 per cent, and is reinvested in the community. Hers is a ‘small is beautiful’ vision, inspired by the German economist EF Schumacher, in which she likens the relationship of small places like Fogo Island with the wider world, to cauliflower florets.
‘And if you owned a piece of this furniture you would be instantly in a relationship with [the island],’ she says, ‘and instantly and strangely, in a relationship with English people from the 18th century, who left Devon and Dorset and went off to Newfoundland. You would physically own a piece of their New World.’ fogoislandshop.ca; fogoislandinn.ca. Another of Donna Wilson’s Fogo Island Inn chairs, the Eadie, is available from SCP in London (scp.co.uk)