“We turned a former post office from 1855 into a boutique hotel with a Nordic spa”

At the height of Covid, Jacqui Liberty, a former health care professional and ceramics artist, and Bruno Roldan, ex-VP of growth at Shopify, purchased a historic inn in Caledon. The building dates back to 1855 and has operated as a post office, a speakeasy, a personal residence, a fine-dining restaurant and several incarnations of guest lodging, but it was languishing during pandemic lockdown restrictions. The couple envisioned a cozy, family-friendly spa getaway that would respect the property’s history. After three years of renovating and a lot of handmade tiles, the Liberty Inn opened in February. Here’s how they did it.

Jacqui: I was born in Guelph and moved to Toronto for work, and that’s where I met Bruno.

Bruno: I’m from Mexico City, but growing up we lived all over the world for my dad’s work. I spent five years in Japan, two years in Korea and five in England. I moved to Winnipeg when I was 18, and after university, I came to Toronto.

Jacqui: We both preferred living in the country, so we moved right on the border between Erin and Caledon about 12 years ago. In 2016, I left my job at Cancer Care Ontario, and two years later our twin daughters were born.

Bruno: When Covid hit, I was working at Shopify. Before that, I was at eBay. While those jobs were very rewarding, after about 10 years in tech, I felt like I was spending too much time behind a computer. When Shopify moved to doing everything remotely, I said, “I don’t want to work like that.” My only plan was to spend some time with the twins before we figured out what to do next.

Jacqui: After our twins were born, we were at home all the time. At that point, I built a small pottery studio in our basement. As soon as our girls were asleep, I would carve out a bit of time to do something for me. Then I thought, I could do this for a living, and I opened Soft Fire Ceramics.

Bruno: We weren’t really looking for an inn—at least not seriously. I’d browse listings from time to time just for fun, never imagining that we’d actually buy one. But, when the Forks of the Credit Inn came up for sale, it stopped us in our tracks.

Jacqui: Bruno is always looking at real estate everywhere. He sends me properties all the time. Usually I’m not interested, and I don’t even always look at them. But I just happened to look at this one.

Bruno: It was fate that she did. We were already familiar with the property from living nearby. We’d driven by the place for years before it came up for sale, sometimes taking a scenic detour just to look at it. We didn’t know much about the inn’s history, but it had always seemed a bit mysterious. After connecting with the previous owner, we learned the deeper story of it having been everything from a post office to a general store to a Prohibition-era speakeasy. That sense of lineage was a big part of the draw.

Jacqui: My first impression was that the building had a lot of potential. It was full of charm and completely unique; it just needed some updates to make it feel current. We weren’t planning to be innkeepers when we came across the listing, but anyone who knows us wouldn’t have been surprised that we decided to take it on. There were parts of the business that each of us would excel at, so we thought, Why not?

Bruno: Jacqui is a maker—she expresses stories through craft, design and thoughtful little details. I’m the entrepreneur—I see opportunities everywhere, especially where there’s a story to be told. We bought the Forks of the Credit Inn for $2.4 million in January of 2022.

Jacqui: It was the height of the market, when everyone was trying to move out of the city. Every property outside of Toronto was going for so much over asking. It was a weird time.

Bruno: It was a quick closing, but the renovations took us three years. There were seven suites that had been converted to apartments because of Covid restrictions. We ended up combining two of the suites, so we now have five. We didn’t want to take away the building’s charm, but we needed to figure out how to undo some of the hasty Covid conversion that didn’t respect the building’s soul. We also turned a recently renovated garage into something functional and guest-friendly, with lockers for bikes, skis and golf clubs.

Jacqui: We wanted it to feel historic but still new and fresh.

Bruno: Originally, we wanted to build an addition for private dinners, but that required changing the footprint of the building, which meant we had to go through the Niagara Escarpment Commission. Because of the pandemic, everybody was building, and the NEC’s response time was six to eight months of back and forth. We started the process, but 10 months in, we realized it wasn’t going to happen.

Jacqui: We also had the idea of putting spa bathrooms in all the suites.

Bruno: We’d stayed at an Airbnb in Germany that had an in-suite sauna, so that was on our minds. I also started doing cold plunges a while back and really enjoyed it—after a long day of work, it would really reset my body. And I had a similar situation with the twins, where it’s a different type of stress.

Jacqui: Our original spa vision required changing the layout of the building, but that was out of our budget. So, for the suites where we could fit something in, we added what we could. Three have steam showers and one has an infrared sauna.

Bruno: We also installed a Nordic spa circuit on the grounds—a cold plunge, a cedar hot tub and a Finnish-style sauna. These came from Forest Cooperage, a BC-based company. Their work really complements the feel of the inn—natural, warm and unpretentious.

Jacqui: I’m very list-driven, so we had a list of criteria for each suite. There had to be something of historical interest, and it needed to be authentic. So, if we had a room with an original exposed limestone wall, that was great. But some rooms were a blank canvas—like you could be anywhere. For those, we decided to add in period features that would have been there in the past. We kept a really nice stained glass feature that was above the front door and used it as a transom in one of the bedrooms.

Jacqui: Another criterion on my list was the personal touch. I don’t know if it was Bruno or me who came up with the idea that I should make the tiles for the inn—I’d been working with ceramics for over 10 years but had never made tiles. We told our designer, Tiffany (from Tiffany Leigh Design), of our plan, and she was fully on board. I did a lot of testing to come up with a palette that felt historic without feeling dated. I would bring along my growing box of test tiles to all our design meetings to find the exact right shades to go with the millwork and the colour schemes in the rooms. Making the tiles took over a year—I even trained my brother-in-law Julio, and he ended up making a huge portion of them.

Bruno: I think it ended up being 10,000 tiles.

Jacqui: I don’t know. I know I learned a lot about making tiles!

Bruno: We were hoping to open last summer, but we didn’t have the gardens ready. We have 1.2 acres and are planning a beautiful botanical garden. But then we thought that opening in winter when it’s a little bit slower would be better so we could work out the kinks. So we opened this past February.

The locals have a lot of memories of this place, and we’re excited for people who got engaged here or celebrated milestones here to come back. We got a call from somebody in her 80s or 90s—what was the word she used?

Jacqui: Courted. She was courted here.

Bruno: There’s a lot of joy when people check in and we get to talk to them and hear about their lives. I was really missing that while working in tech marketing, which was all about driving people online. But running an inn is all about making real, in-person connections.