Travels With Hannah: Pausing, Delightfully, at Manoir Hovey

Canada smelled like snow. It only took three hours to arrive at the border from Massachusetts. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget how close we live to our northerly neighbor. But as soon as we reached the Eastern Townships, in November, we were greeted with Quebeçois reminders: signs written in French, tiny villages that looked like they had been transported from the French countryside and transplanted just near the Vermont border. When we arrived at Manoir Hovey, the 39-room, 30-acre Relais & Chateaux property that overlooks Lake Massawippi, a fine dusting of snow had just started to fall.

It was the perfect time, then, to settle into our Beau-Rivage Spa Suite, which sat suspended out over the lake and featured a cozy fireplace, sofa, balcony, and massive bathroom with freestanding tub. At a quiet place like Manoir Hovey, I would find, where the point is true relaxation, it wasn’t hard to sink into the delights proffered by nature and its surroundings.

Manoir Hovey was built in 1899 for Henry Atkinson, the founder of Georgia Power. It was his summer estate, a rambling spot ripe for fishing and lounging and taking in nature. In the 1950s, the property was refashioned as a hotel and has since attracted the interest of celebrities and well-heeled travelers. The Stafford family purchased the hotel in 1979. Jason Stafford, the property’s maître de maison, is a third-generation hotelier.

In the main dining room each evening, where we ate three meals at Le Hatley, among the region’s most famed restaurants (it’s now 5-diamond CAA/AAA), fires blazed and guests dressed up for the occasion leaned intimately over tablecloths and candlelight. If fine dining in the States has lost its intimacy, formality, and verve, it hasn’t in this slice of Canada, where foie gras is still served au torchon, and where a languorous tasting menu can still stretch for hours. There’s really no rush, they want you to know.

Every night, we assumed the best table in the house, a four-top near a weathered fireplace that was perfect for staving off the cold (and it was, in fact, quite brisk outside, maybe colder than we had throughout our entire New England winter). The actual fireplace was framed by two benches, and when our kids lost interest between courses, I sat between them and read by firelight. That felt bewitching and sweet, to be between children on a cold fall night awaiting the next delicious course. If all the bites were stunning at Le Hatley — they were — perhaps what was most arresting was the emergence of the cheese cart at meal’s end, just before dessert. It chugged in like a locomotive, perhaps a bit wary of its age and attitude in a moment poised for cell phones and Apple watches.

But beneath a film of glass, there they were, a host of local cheeses, described in detail by our waiter, who knew morning milk from night, sheep from goat. That was a luxury long-lost, of course, a faded decadence that we so rarely see anymore in the U.S. And so, it felt rare and wonderful to be able to experience it once again.

Manoir Hovey is particularly sleepy in post-foliage fall. The lake wasn’t frozen yet, so we could not skate or go ice-fishing. The outdoor, heated pool allows children in the early-morning hours, but my own kids preferred to snuggle up with books and a fireplace (the library area in the main building also offered games, like checkers, as well as a pristine view of the water). My husband and I took turns at the lakeside spa, a new addition to the property; it’s open to guests 14 and up. There, guests are welcome to experience the infinity pool, hot tubs, a cold-plunge pool, a dry sauna, a steam room, and relaxation rooms with a view of the lake.

One day, we drove into town to experience the local sights. We bought chocolates from a chocolatier, exiting with paper bags that were customized to suit each of our four individual palates. Next, we headed to the grocery store, just a petite, small town pass-through and yet still imbued with cases upon cases of local cheeses, well-stocked charcuterie, foie gras as far as we could see.

We drove, too, into Sherbrooke, where we spent a few hours milling around the Sherbrooke Museum of Nature and Science, a slim-but-fascinating place where we learned about species native to Canada, and where my kids marveled at hulking taxidermy on display. Fishing for a snack, we drove to the Marché de la Gare de Sherbrooke, a local market housed in a former train station. Inside, vendors sold ruby red cuts of meat, loaves of bread studded with olives (we grabbed one to eat in the car), soft maple candies, massive blocks of Quebeçois cheese, and Canadian wine.

If eating seems like a common theme, it’s because gastronomy is practically a rite of passage in the Eastern Townships. You can’t go to the region without coming face-to-face with small farms. Driving through, you see meadows that belong to farmers and growers. Each morning, the breakfast experience begins with a platter to share, featuring house-made pastries and local cheese. All this before the main attraction: bright yellow duck egg omelets, for instance, made creamy with cheese.

And so, we came to Manoir Hovey to relax. To sit in the woods overlooking the lake and to eat. To be by a fire and to indulge in the virtues of doing not much of anything at all. To hit pause on the restlessness of the pace of our lives and to sink, instead, into the slow swing of everyday life in the Eastern Townships.