If you would like to visit southern Ontario (specifically somewhere outside of Toronto) and stay in a cool design-forward lifestyle hotel, what are your options? The obvious ones are the Drake Devonshire, The Royal Hotel, and Wander the Resort in Prince Edward County (~2.5 hours east of Toronto).

Looking north of Toronto, The Postmark Hotel in Newmarket is a nice boutique hotel. But I can't think of any others and there aren't any lifestyle hotels in Muskoka. That's cottage country.

Moving toward the west, Elora Mill is a popular hotel and destination (with very high ADRs), but I would not call it a design forward lifestyle hotel. It's traditional luxury. So that's roughly it. Your only other options are trendy motels, such as the Beach Motel in Southhampton.

Now let's look specifically at the Niagara Peninsula (where we have proposed a design-forward lifestyle hotel). The three most popular destinations are Niagara Falls, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and the Niagara Benchlands. And each year, this region receives over 13 million visitors, 30-40% of which are American.

But again, I would argue that there are exactly this many design-forward lifestyle hotels on the Peninsula: 0. The market is dominated by Vintage Hotels, which is not this.

But that's set to change next year. The Clayfield, which is part of Hyatt's Unbound Collection, is currently under construction across from Stratus Wines in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The design is by Sid Lee Architecture out of Montréal (which

What I was getting at with the above tweet is that I think there's way more demand, for places like this and this, than there is supply. Click on the first link and you'll see that it's booked up all summer long. And as for the second link, I just booked one of their rentals for this summer, but I have been trying -- for years -- to book it in the winter.

I think the unmet use case is as simple as this: I live in a big city, and I want to get out of the city and go somewhere cool and design-forward. There are, of course, some options. But there's a need for a lot more. Generally speaking, it feels to me like the majority of the supply is either (1) an expensive/large cottage or (2) an old "classic luxury" kind of hotel.

I'm specifically referring to Toronto and southern Ontario with these options, but judging by some of the responses I got to my tweet, this appears to be an opportunity in many other markets as well. But I would be curious to hear from all you in comments or on