What happens when the place comes along before you’ve figured out exactly what to do with it?
In this episode, we meet Darcy, who dreamed of creating a retreat space in Ontario. When an 80-acre apple orchard and cider house came up for sale at the end of the road, she and her husband, Ian, jumped in.
There was farming to learn, a bar to run, and plenty to figure out. Now, adding an event space to gather at Spy Cider House + Distillery, Darcy’s original dream is taking shape: yoga, walks through the orchard, meals overlooking the sunset, and the possibility of feeling restored after just a day away.
We talk about taking the leap, learning as you go, and giving a much-loved baby name a rather different home.
Transcript
[Darcy] I mean, I think in order to do anything like this, you need a healthy dose of ignorance. And we didn’t know what we were doing, and we just jumped in. I owned a few yoga studios in Toronto, and in 2017, my husband, Ian, was really feeling anxious to get out of the city.
[Narrator] So they packed up the kids and traded Toronto traffic for life in the Blue Mountains. A lovely idea with one small complication—Darcy still had yoga studios to run back in the city. There was a fair bit of back and forth for a while, but living up north got Darcy thinking about something she’d noticed while leading retreats in other parts of the world.
[Darcy] I take a group of people to these retreat environments, and people would feel transported. I’m like, I don’t understand how come this doesn’t exist in Ontario. So there was always this sort of pipe dream of like, I wonder if I could create some sort of retreat centre.
And then this opportunity came our way. We live at the end of the road. There was an 80-acre apple orchard for sale and an alcohol brand, and it felt like it all happened very quickly. It felt like something much bigger than us was at play.
Truthfully, we didn’t know exactly what it would be. We knew that the land was magic and that there was an opportunity to create something. And so we bought it. We, you know, we started to try our hand at farming, which is hysterical.
At the beginning, Ian and I were bartending. We didn’t have really a set of staff. We still have a very, very lean team.
We’re really, really weather-dependent here inside the tasting room. You know, we have a little nook upstairs, and we have this bar space, but we’re we’re certainly limited for space, which sort of restricts us being a four-season destination.
And so we started exploring the possibility of opening a space, which took us two years of sort of advocating for an on-farm, diversified use with the town. And we were like, okay, if we can build this and in our business model bank on, you know, X amount of weddings, X amount of corporate events, then the wellness piece becomes something that is like, okay, this is going to be something that’s going to be able to sort of pay the bills, if you will, and then we can expand on the other side without too much, too much, too much stress.
So I had my first wellness pop-up last week. We had 50 people practicing yoga together, going for a walk through the orchards and then, you know, finishing with a beautiful meal on the terrace overlooking the sunset. And yeah, that’s just a dream come true for me, because I really don’t think that exists here—this place where people can come and truly unplug from their lives and feel like they’ve reset in one day, one day spent on the orchard.
[Narrator] Turns out it wasn’t just Darcy and Ian who found their happy place in this orchard. On any given weekend, there are families hanging out, dogs making new friends, live music, and lots of cider being poured. They host an annual cider festival that brings makers together from all over Ontario, and now a new event space.
More reasons to visit, more room to get creative, and probably a few more things for Darcy and Ian to figure out along the way. But first they needed a name—and Darcy had one she’d been saving.
{Darcy] I always wanted to name one of my kids, Woodrow. And so we have, we have a son named Arthur. And I was pregnant with my, my daughter Leif, and we thought that she was going to be a boy. And it was going to be Woody. Woody Woodrow. Anyways, she was a girl, and her name is Leif.
And I feel like, you know, if you got married there, it’s sophisticated, the Woodrow, but it’s also like, oh, I got married at the Woody, you know? So it was perfect.
