Roughing it with Shannon Hunter

It’s a beautiful day in Bloomfield, the sky is staunchly blue, littered with puffy white clouds, and the breeze is blowing our hair into big halos around our faces while we settle into the cushy cabana to sit, talk and relax in the midst of a very busy stretch at Wander the Resort. Shannon Hunter and I have just ordered a pitcher of Aperol Spritz from the bar and asked Chef Justin Daniel Tse if he could put together a few charcuterie skewers to roast over the fire pit at our “campsite.” Roughing it with Shannon is truly a high art.

When Condé Nast named Wander the Resort “Canada’s best new hotel” in 2021, it had barely been open for six weeks. “Everyone arrived expecting the best new hotel in Canada,” Shannon remembers, “so it was an enormous amount of pressure to live up to when we were still brand new. It was definitely a trial by fire. But the team was amazing, they rose to the occasion.”

While the accolades arrived early, Shannon’s vision for the lakefront cabin retreat in the County is only now on the verge of completion, with the spa in its final phase and the treehouse cabins on the horizon. When I arrived a few hours earlier, I had to walk over a makeshift drawbridge to get to the clubhouse. The final leg of construction for the new spa was in full swing and Shannon, in work mode, was appearing and disappearing between meetings, fielding questions from her team and making in-the-moment decisions. “My comfort zone is being fifty percent terrified and fifty percent excited,” she tells me, her eyes sparkly. “If I get too comfortable, I’m not pushing hard enough, and if I get too scared I need to pull back a little – but this is the sweet spot.”

Initially, the overall Scandi-Canadiana vibe and ten stunning lakeside cabins caught everyone’s eye, but Shannon soon added a multipool circuit with hot tub and sauna, an exquisitely designed lobby-clubhouse with an indoor-outdoor restaurant, a beach club with outdoor bar and snacks, and a gift shop selling a well-curated selection of local goods. And now, the Wander experience is about to reach new heights with a spectacular 10,000-square-foot hydro-circuit Nordic spa that I’m already dying to melt into. Some months back, Shannon took me on a walking tour of the site, which meant watching her negotiate unfinished ledges in very high heels to show me the final views – several I declined on account of major fear.

She’s infinitely bold, this wife of a local physician and mom of two. And as founder and president of a busy and growing resort, Shannon has a huge collection of hats that she wears simultaneously. This scenario is old hat, though. “My journey here was very convoluted,” she explained. “I have one degree in zoology and another in radiation medicine. I worked in lung cancer research at Princess Margaret Hospital for years and while I was doing that, I was going to school and buying, designing and flipping condos to fund being in school.” I’m totally in awe of Shannon and her intense juggling capabilities. “At the end of my radiation medicine program, I won a scholarship to go anywhere in the world and work at a hospital, so I picked Cape Town, South Africa. I’d already spent three months in Kenya in the last semester of my zoology program and [my now husband] Noah and I had spent time in Zambia, so I wanted to be in Cape Town working at the hospital that has the distinction of being the location of the first successful open heart surgery.”

“Chris Barnard,” I note, calling to mind the cardiac surgeon who performed the operation. My dad has been drilling medical trivia into me since literally the day I was born, but it’s the first time I’ve used this tidbit. Shannon nods, “Cape Town was an interesting animal,” she says. “I worked part-time at the private hospital where literally, someone came in every three hours to do a full-spread tea service for us while we were working, and then we worked at the public hospital where we didn’t have enough blankets for people.” Shannon returned to the Canadian public system with a new appreciation. “Some years later, when I was pregnant with Elle, a friend asked me to design their kitchen, and the project just kept getting larger until I was almost accidentally running my own company,” she laughs. “I was using similar skill sets for design as I was for lung cancer – designing in CAD to model patients’ lungs and the same technology to design friends’ kitchens. So it was a natural transition.” We giggle. On maternity leave, when her daughter was six weeks old, Shannon began taking on real clients, hired an office manager and got her real estate license. Her mentor at Princess Margaret had moved to the U.S. and it was the right time to make some changes.

“…we’re doing luxury in a way that feels very comfortable and accessible: I want you to feel you could put your feet up on anything…” SHANNON HUNTER

Back in May, the two of us stayed overnight at Wander in the cabin that was right on the beach with the full lake view. We sat at the kitchen table and analyzed our younger selves. “I was a little shy,” Shannon says. “And then in Grade Two I started doing a ton of theatre, and I did that until I was in my twenties.”

“Seriously?” I ask, cutting her off.

“Yes!” she says laughing. “By the time I was in Grade Six, I was mostly doing theatre with an adult group. So I spent a lot of time with adults – that’s where I gained my confidence and my ability to speak for myself and be comfortable in new situations.” Theatre was a huge part of Shannon’s life for nearly two decades. Every summer during university she worked for Theatre Collingwood, doing mostly British comedy, and then with Daffydil, U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s theatrical production fundraiser in support of the Canadian Cancer Society. “The joint programs like radiation medicine, physiotherapy and speech pathology put on a show for a week, all done by the students,” she says. “In my first year, I was one of the writers and actors and in the second year I directed it and played the lead.” This was it: a glimpse of the emergence of the bold, mature, funny Shannon who could manage all the juggling that future Shannon’s life would demand.

It took me all evening to notice that Shannon had been constantly adjusting the atmospherics in the cabin to make sure the lighting was always perfect even as the sun moved across the sky. The music consistently reflected the evolving mood, and the snacks and drinks were refilled and followed us as we moved into different spaces while the evening unfolded. “I don’t think that I’m naturally a very high-maintenance person,” she says, lighting the fire on our private deck as we sink into our chairs. “I’m low key, I never get my nails done – that’s just never been who I am and in some ways, it’s hilarious to me that I run a luxury resort, right?” We laugh. “But also, we’re doing luxury in a way that feels very comfortable and accessible: I want you to feel you could put your feet up on anything and not feel like you’re gonna break something.”

Roasting s’mores around a roaring campfire, swimming, skating and playing games together are welcome alternatives from the escalated sensory intensity of the typical kid-geared venues. Shannon knew that a luxury retreat didn’t need to mean for adults only. “I grew up in an era where there were rooms in our house that no one ever used,” she says. “The dining room and the living room were for some imaginary guests that might arrive one day and would need a place that was perfect, but I always wondered ‘why do we have this section of our house that is never used by anyone?’ So at my house, we eat dinner at our dining table and we use the same dishes and the same cutlery on a Monday night that I use if somebody comes for a nice dinner on a Saturday night.” I look around, noticing the intentionally chosen furnishing and finishes that sit quietly behind the perfect design. “I decided I didn’t want to put coasters in there, because as soon as we put in coasters, everyone is worried.” She imagines the guest character: “‘Oh, where’s the coaster? I need to get the coaster; the kids can’t put their drink here; they don’t want us to put our drinks down there’ and now it’s this barrier to just enjoying the space. Basically, we want our guests to never have to get up off their seat for something like a coaster – by not having them at all. Then everyone’s just gonna put their drink wherever they want to put it. And we’ll have chosen surfaces that can handle it.”

This is interior design comedy at its finest. But I do get it: we always forget to live today, postponing pleasure for some imagined future; exercising austerity to save up for joy. Suddenly I think back to 2010, when we first started collecting good wine only to learn some years later, to our great dismay, that we hadn’t stored it properly and bottle after bottle had devolved into vinegar.

“Why don’t you sign up for local theatre?” I ask Shannon. “I want to,” she says, smiling. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do when there’s a break.”

“To enjoying all the moments in the moment…” I say pointedly, raising my glass across the fire. She clinks mine and we sink a little lower into our very pretty and very comfortable chairs and look out at the bright moon rising high over the pretty lake.