Chicago Booth Magazine Call of the Wild

Patrick Wallace, ’12 (AXP-11), wasn’t quite sure what he was getting into when he and his wife, Pamela Wallace, drove down a long dirt road with miles of forest on either side in the heart of the Nova Scotia wilderness. When they finally emerged at Trout Point Lodge, however, the property was a revelation. “It is this incredible log structure where otherwise there would be nothing,” Wallace said. Around the lodge itself stretched 125 acres of densely forested landscape with only the chirping of birds and the rushing course of the Tusket River to break the silence. “It was an island of luxury in the middle of the wilderness.”

The Wallaces were so swayed by this property that they left at the height of their careers to take on new jobs as luxury wilderness innkeepers. “This was not a retirement project at all,” Wallace said. “We just fell in love with the place.”

Wallace, who grew up in Montreal, is no stranger to taking risks. Starting out his career in the late 1990s in marketing and sales in the semiconductor business, he took a two-year contract in Singapore that turned into twelve.

Since then, his work has taken him to Hong Kong and Korea as he added financial management duties to his portfolio and worked with most of the world’s largest semiconductor companies. He entered the Booth Executive MBA Program in Asia to bolster his financial bona fides. “It teaches you to question your assumptions and be as quantitative as you can when you are dealing with valuing a business or understanding its potential,” he said.

That analytical background came in handy in assessing the opportunity to buy Trout Point Lodge. Wallace moved back to Montreal in 2012 with Pamela, whom he had met in Singapore and who has a background in hospitality. They heard about the sale in early 2017 from the previous owners, and began doing due diligence to see if it might make sense to embark on a new chapter.

It wasn’t until they visited as guests in July 2017, however, that they were seduced by the property’s unusual combination of high luxury and high adventure. “The one thing we really liked about Trout Point Lodge was the totally unique quality of this hotel,” he said. Trout Point has arguably one of the finest restaurants in Atlantic Canada, thanks to a culinary team that boasts significant experience in Michelin-starred venues in Germany and Austria. Its menu features dishes such as swordfish tataki with New Brunswick caviar, and panfried halibut with pickled egg yolk and brown-butter foam. At the same time, the lodge has views of some of the darkest skies in North America, a quality that has led to its being named the first “Starlight Hotel.”