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Design duo Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan revealed the nightmare of renovating a remote hotel in Canada nearly ended their marriage. The celebrity designers said the makeover of the five-acre, million- dollar North Star hotel on Novia Scotia’s windswept Cape Breton island pushed their 30-year relationship to the limit. But the larger-than-life presenters, who are huge stars across the pond, managed to ride out the storm and are toasting the success of their first summer season as hoteliers.
Justin, who grew up in Fort William and dreamed of owning a hotel, said: “Renovating North Star has been the toughest and mostpressured project we have ever tackled. It put a lot of strain on our relationship. I would say we came to our nearest break. It was hard to be in a tiny little town with no social connections, no friends or family.
“It was difficult to detach from that stress. I never felt l ike we were together as a couple. It just felt that we were together as two people on this race to get this hotel finished. It was really tough. I probably did blame myself as it was my idea. I felt I pushed myself and Colin too far, too quickly and too hard into a world we didn’t know.”
Colin added: “Justin loved the hotel from the get-go but I wasn’t feeling it. Up until this point, we had all our adventures together but I started to think this was going to be the one which broke us.
“Then Justin wrote me a tearjerker of a letter in which he poured his heart out about how much he wanted the hotel – that was it, I knew I couldn’t stand in the way of his dreams.
“There’s a saying – if a couple can survive a renovation on a house, they can survive forever. So if we can survive renovating 24 individual apartments, we can survive anything.”
The former Sunday Mail columnists’ latest makeover adventure is the focus of new Channel 5 series Colin & Justin’s Hotel Hell, which documents how they turned a nightmare into a dream. From storms smashing five sets of