Crossing back over the island we made our way over to Fogo Island. I read somewhere, somewhat romantically, that Fogo was an Island off of an Island, somewhere in the North Atlantic and if that doesn’t make you want to go explore, then I don’t know what will. As an architect, I was really interested in going there to explore the work of Todd Saunders. Todd is a Norwegian based Canadian architect born in Gander, NL (which I stopped by briefly to check out the history of aviation on this trip). I had met Todd at an architecture talk in Banff the month prior as he was giving a talk about his own origin story in architecture and the evolution and craft involved in his work.
Fogo Island is a unique community that was once upon a time based on fishing, but since the halt of the fisheries in NL, reinvented itself to become a luxury travel destination with the Fogo Island Inn, and an arts and crafts hub with design of several artist studios dotted across the island. All of these projects were co-designed with the Saunders studio, and all have a strong connection to the existing typical Newfoundland house vernacular style, reinterpreted into modern commerical structures. So, architecturally speaking, it is a really interesting place to explore what I want to call ‘The New Rock Modern ‘, or however we want to talk about the architectural style being birthed out of this island.
Traditionally speaking, Newfoundland has a lot of brightly painted wood buildings, quaint fishing villages, and most buildings are smaller in scale. The reasons for this kind of represent Newfoundlanders as a people. They have colourful/artistic spirits, they are deeply practical, resourceful with what they on hand, and have a strong ‘I can build this myself’ type of work ethic that you really have to admire. Building are painted wood because if they were vinyl siding it would be ripped off by the wind (which I also saw several times). The image below is a fishing work shed that was repurposed into a kitchen party music hall, where we crammed 40-50 of us to listen to artists play traditional music at a Kitchen Party. It would have been originally resting on piles over the water.
The house I was staying in was an 100yr old Saltbox house about 15mins from the ferry, right on the ocean. It was absolutely gorgeous and we had the nicest of hosts, I can’t gush about them enough. This house is a traditional typical type of housing typology in Newfoundland, representing the most efficient use of space and how a lot of Newfoundlanders in the 20th century grew up.
The work of Todd Saunders is based on a lot of these earlier designs, however it is reinterpreted. Take the Fogo Island Inn, the building features wood ceilings, walls, and feature wall paper. These materials are very typical to the the traditional salt box house, moreover the walls and ceilings in the Inn are done showing the cracks between boards to evoke the connection to these 100 year old houses. The Inn is also situated on these steel piles that float the building above the land, very similar to the how the fishing sheds were floated over the water traditionally. These are all, presummambly, connections to Saunder’s youth growing up near here in the 1970’s.
The restrained colour palette is something that we see in all of the projects on the Island, with the architect preferring to show colour in the handcrafted furnishings or quilts in the building. The colour is also reflective of house Newfoundland really looks the 9 months of the year it is not summer, in that it is quite remote and home to a temperamental sea washing rocky shores. The Tower studio and squish studio is another implementation of this austere aesthetic giving preference to simplified form over colour to create remote pieces of beauty. When I saw them, I was immediately reminded of icebergs floating over the landscape.
This is going to be it for the Newfoundland Trip 2026. My family and I are busily preparing for the World trip starting in August 2026, and the planning for traveling 8 months and teaching our 14year old abroad is going to be a lot of organize. But I will post more with how the planning is coming when we are on more solid ground. So until then, as the Newfoundlanders might say: Take care, me ducky.
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