By Trevor Greenway
Lynn Berthiaume never thought her vision of owning a hotel in Quebec would have taken her as far as The Wakefield Mill has taken her and her family. Her former business partner, Bob Milling, always knew it would.
“Bang on,” says Milling, sitting in the main bar room of The Wakefield Mill after being asked if his 27-year-old vision was fully realized. He and Berthiaume are sitting in front of the hotel’s central fireplace, potentially the last time they will be in the room together as business partners.
Milling and Berthiaume officially sold The Wakefield Mill to a new family of owners and say that, while it’s bittersweet, the timing was just right to move on.
“It’s joy and sadness,” says Berthiaume, pulling up memories from the nearly three decades she spent with her family running the business. And when she says family, she truly means it. Not only did her and former husband Bob’s two sons, Luc and Gabe, work at The Mill while growing up, but Berthiaume’s mom, Patricia, also worked there as an interior decorator. So did her father, Guy. He worked as an historian, who documented the construction and spent hours digging through archives at the Gatineau Valley Historical Society.
“To me, this place is all about family,” says Berthiaume. “In this beautiful place in space, there is a magic in the air here, and it creates families and deepens family connections. We have had many mothers and daughters, sons and fathers and aunts and cousins and nieces and nephews all work here together, and that itself becomes its own family.”
Berthiaume tells the Low Down that she will miss the people the most: the employees, the community and the guests she’s witnessed making lasting memories. For Milling, he says he’ll miss the rhythm, the daily hum and bustle of running a busy hotel in Quebec.
“The privilege part of my job was to set the table, metaphorically, for connection,” says Milling. “That connection could be celebrations of life, funerals, weddings, engagements, just special memories. When you’re in a memories business, it’s a pretty good business to be in, especially in a world of artificial intelligence. The future is about authenticity, and this is something real.”
Some of those special memories, he says, included some pretty high-profile guests. Readers may recall the day American snipers and secret service agents descended on Wakefield as they secured the village for a visit by then U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Clinton had lunch at The Mill in 2010 with then-conservative MP Lawrence Cannon and it was a first for Wakefield residents to see American snipers posted on the roof of The Wakefield Mill, their guns trained at whatever looked the least bit suspicious.
Milling and Berthiaume put years of work into the 186-year-old property, which used to be an old abandoned flour mill, and later a museum. When Milling leased the building from the National Capital Commission, he says it was in complete disrepair. Following months of construction – complicated construction because the structure is a heritage building owned by the NCC – the building was transformed into an 18-room hotel, complete with restaurants, a spa and an attractive lookout over the La Pêche falls. Milling and Berthiaume later built the Eco River Lodge, the first-ever – and now one of only two – LEED-certified hotels in Quebec today.
New owners don’t “foresee any big changes” in immediate future
The future of The Wakefield Mill now belongs to the Nahon family of Ottawa, who officially purchased the business in early December and spent their first week greeting new employees, getting a lay of the land and meeting with the local newspaper. They are operating on a lease through the NCC until 2099.
“I don’t think we foresee any big changes, certainly not in the first year,” says Daniel Nahon, sitting with his son Julien, who will help run the hotel. “After that, we’re going to listen to the customers and listen to the employees. We certainly have the resources to make changes. That’s in our plans.”
Daniel’s family is originally from Morocco, and he moved to Montreal with them when he was four years old, while his wife, Donna, is from Poland. The pair moved to Ottawa in the 1980s, where he worked as a mechanical, medical and bio-medical engineer for decades. He then started investing in real estate and purchased The Calobogie Lodge Resort with the idea of renovating and flipping it for a quick profit. But after running the resort for several years, he says his family started to fall in love with it – the routines, the guests, the employees and the sheer joy of helping others create lasting memories. They decided to keep it and are now growing their hotel footprint by purchasing The Wakefield Mill.
“There was a lot of stuff I had to learn, but then, progressively, as the years went on, it became easier and easier, and at one point, it actually became enjoyable,” says Nahon about running the Calabogie Lodge. “So my original idea of just buying it and flipping it sort of went away.”
The family still owns the Lodge at Calabogie and has gotten it to a point where it’s nearly self-sufficient. They say they will now focus their attention and energy on The Wakefield Mill, getting to know the staff, the many buildings on the property and the community.