Incredibly, violence is what created the stunning view from Erica and Eli Halliwell’s La Malbaie cottage deck. Four hundred and fifty million years ago, a meteorite slammed into what’s now the Charlevoix region of Quebec, where the St. Lawrence River opens its mouth and eventually spills into the Atlantic. But on a late-August afternoon, the Halliwells’ focus isn’t on the scenery, it’s on giving hugs and seeing their 20-year-old daughter, Malka, off to school.
Malka is in her third year at the University of Vermont, so goodbyes have gotten easier. (Erica and Eli’s 18-year-old son Levi’s upcoming departure for his first year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland will be another story, says Erica.) As summer comes to a close, the family’s hardest goodbye right now is to the place that’s become an escape and an inspiration. Levi’s been at camp in Maine, and Malka came for August, but Eli and Erica—and their dogs Ziggy and Yuna— spent the summer at the cottage, their days in La Malbaie guided by the rhythm of the St. Lawrence’s tides. Time here is a balance of exploring and appreciating the landscape and, for Erica and Eli, managing several businesses from afar.
This cottage, and its more than 100 acres of boreal-transition forest, is a 10-hour drive from the family’s home in Irvington, N.Y., just north of New York City. Cottaging in remote Quebec is a commitment, an intentional escape from what feels like chaos everywhere else.
Eli, an entrepreneur, business owner, and an investor, is feeling the stress of increasing economic and political instability. “The world is going to go through some tough changes,” he says, after watching Malka drive away. “I want my family and the people I love to make it through.”
Eli’s American, raised in Vermont. Erica’s Canadian, the granddaughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors who were imprisoned in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. Her father was born in Bergen-Belsen six weeks before it was liberated. The family immigrated to Ontario in 1947; Erica’s maternal grandparents, who spent the war in hiding, came in 1948. Erica grew up in Toronto and attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. In 2002, while working as an account executive at a digital advertising agency in Manhattan, she met Eli. It was a blind date at a yoga studio that led them to one another, and all these years later, they’re intrinsically bound—still practising yoga together at the start of each day, working side by side in businesses that require constant collaboration, and both fiercely loving and protecting their children.
The couple’s search for a family getaway began about a decade ago, pushed by concerns over American politics. They knew what they wanted—a place where they could survive and thrive if home felt too dangerous, says Eli. A place “that has lots of water and not a lot of people.”
While Eli might have been satisfied far from civilization, “I also needed community,” says Erica, “to know there was a town, so I could still feel the energy of other people.”
They visited Nova Scotia’s South Shore, as well as Cape Breton, and Tofino, on Vancouver Island. “But then,” says Eli, “I saw an article in the New York Times about this property for sale. The house was special, but what got me interested was the description of the community—the confluence of farming and artisan food and spirits with the mountains and the water. It just felt like a magical alignment in everything we were looking for,” says Eli. “We came here, and this stunning view fell out of the sky.”
In 2019, the Halliwells rented that cottage in La Malbaie. And in 2022, they bought it. “We are at the edge,” says Eli. “It feels like there is nothing between here and the North Pole.”
That’s how it appears from the Halliwells’ snaking driveway that opens to their cottage, perched above sloping rock and forest. All around is big sky and big water that blur together where they meet. In the other direction, the Laurentians fade into the distance.
“When I’m up in the middle of the night getting worried about everything,” says Eli, “I feel a little bit more comfortable being here.”
The Halliwell cottage, completed in 2008, is a blend of ski chalet and hunting lodge, a woodsy Old World–style structure decorated with taxidermy—a lynx ready to pounce, a massive moose head—and feathers, birchbark, and baskets. White oak beams stretch overhead. Glassed gables let in light. A fireplace at the cottage’s centre is well-used in winter, when the Halliwells come to ski. There’s a roomy apartment above the garage, taken over this summer by Malka, and, on a lower section of the property, a pagoda-like guesthouse called the “Renardière,” or fox house, that looks like a three-tiered wedding cake. Inside, furnishings are spare, just the basics. Someday, Eli and Erica hope this structure will accommodate their children’s future families when they come to La Malbaie.
All of this was here when the Halliwells bought the place, and you get the sense that they care less about the walls and what’s on them and more about the landscape: almost seven kilometres of groomed trails, a pond, waterfalls that cascade into a gorge, and all of it surrounded by forest—a blend of yellow birch, red maple, conifers, and great mats of moss and lichen. Moose amble through the trees. Foxes, raccoons, porcupines, black bears, and other wildlife make appearances on the property.
Then there’s what’s beyond their land—an all-season playground that includes three national parks, ski resorts Le Massif and Mont Grand-Fonds, and, of course, the mighty St. Lawrence. Charlevoix is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve site, recognized for its balanced relationship between nature and the region’s inhabitants. The food here is exceptional, says Erica: local cheeses from La Laiterie in Baie-Saint-Paul, smoked fish spreads from Pêcheries Charlevoix, foie gras from La Ferme Basque—the list goes on and on. Pastoral, charming, French-speaking—everything here is the opposite of life back home in Irvington.
“We need to be active,” says Erica. In addition to their daily yoga practice, she and Eli hike and paddle, and, in the winter, skin up peaks—climb with textured “skins” on the bottom of their skis—for a more physical approach to skiing.
They’re both fit and seemingly indefatigable, and they always seem to have another outing in the works.
And now, with Malka off to school and Levi relaxing back at the cottage, Eli and Erica take a walk—down, down, down, then up, up, up their trails. At the pond, Eli jumps in. Erica sits nearby on a hunk of granite while Yuna paces the shoreline, parting cattails and startling a couple of mallards. Two kilometres beyond where Erica sits, the St. Lawrence beckons.
“It’s a river to take seriously,” says Eli. “The water is crazy cold, there are dangerous currents, and it’s easy to tire yourself out if you don’t plan ahead.”
Last summer, he tested the water, studying nautical maps and paddling pockets of the river, to prep for an epic kayak adventure. The plan was that he and Erica would take a 24-kilometre trip, riding the current along the steep, rocky coastline from the marina in La Malbaie northeast to Port-au-Persil. They’d explore a part of the river that serves as a liquid highway for a dozen or so whale species, among them humpbacks, blues, and minkes.
Finally, this past August, Eli and Erica set out on a morning when the conditions were just right—little wind, the water’s surface glassy. They began spotting whales almost immediately. “At first, pilot whales,” says Eli. “And then I saw white shimmering all over the water.” These were belugas, and “they kept coming up all around us. Every once in a while they would dive, tails up.” The whales drifted past in waves, at one point a hundred or so, Eli estimates.
Eventually, the Halliwells reached the cove where Malka was waiting, ready to pick them up. They had paddled for three hours, some of that time spent simply floating, paddles up, within the whale pods.
“It was beyond my wildest fantasy of what that trip was going to be,” says Eli.
The cottage deck is the family epicentre. “We watch the water, the tides, the waves, the weather,” says Erica, as she sits in a weathered wooden deck chair, facing the river, Eli taking the seat beside her. “It’s a place of extremes,” he says, “like when the weather tells you to sit down and shut up. You have to know how to plan ahead, to get to town to stock the basics if there’s a storm coming.”
When Malka’s at the cottage, she explores the property—“a place out of a fairytale”—by foot and on ATV. She visits Charlevoix’s alpaca farm and the dunes at Tadoussac, about an hour’s drive away. Last fall, she brought college friends for a visit and they “did puzzles for days,” she says, wowed by how detached this place feels from the bustle back at school. Levi favours winter, when the skiing is exceptional. “I’m a big fan of snow,” he says.
“There are a lot of kids who wouldn’t want to be this far away, this disconnected from what’s happening at home,” says Erica. “I feel lucky that they’re happy to be here.”
She also appreciates the distance. Back in New York, “it’s so easy to feel expectations about what you’re wearing and driving. It’s freeing to be here, to not have to think about any of that.”
In La Malbaie, a work-life balance is easier to maintain. “In New York, I feel guilty taking time for myself,” says Erica. “Here, I don’t. If we can move a meeting around, we’ll go hiking or paddling.”
Eli’s career, which he describes as “a twisty, turny road, with lots of successes and challenges” has included running a global skin care business, working on Wall Street, and starting his own companies. A decade ago, he “conscripted” Erica to partner with him at Hairstory, a company with a line of detergent-free products. “They clean your hair without stripping it of its natural oils,” says Erica.
The Hairstory chapter of the Halliwells’ lives introduced a new level of freedom. Together, they could work remotely, being home for the kids’ lacrosse and soccer games, or travelling as a family. They created a lifestyle that worked for them, and that paved the way for their cottage search.
Eventually, the couple created products inspired by their surroundings. The Halliwells wanted to work with Canadian chemists, and “the products came back amazing,” says Erica. So they launched Sans Savon, a line of body and hand wash products using oil-based formulas infused with the smell of the La Malbaie forest. Sea-colored bottles mimic the silhouette of Saguenay’s lighthouse and are wrapped in packaging with topographic maps of the region. A portion of the profits go to local organizations affiliated with hut-to-hut hiking and skiing trail systems.
After a cocktail, followed by dinner— the St. Lawrence as backdrop, tonight a shifting pattern of azure swirls—it’s early to bed. The Halliwells will leave at daybreak, the start of a long drive home. They won’t return until December, when the landscape morphs into a winter wonderland, blanketed by deep snow.
Levi is packed, ready for an early-morning wake-up call, and preparing to launch his life overseas. He says he looks forward to coming back here, to the calmness he feels at the cottage, where “there’s nothing to worry about.” Throughout their lives, he and Malka have been given the gift of travel, their parents bringing them to marvels around the globe. Still, says Levi, “it’s hard to find a place in the world like this.”
Annie Stoltie is the editor-in-chief of Adirondack Life magazine. She wrote “Now and Again” in our Aug ’25 issue.
This story originally appeared in our Spring ’26 issue.
Related Story Saunas are a hot trend, but for these Finnish-Canadians in Northern Ontario, it’s a treasured cultural practice
Related Story What Ottawa’s proposed high-speed rail line could mean for cottagers
Related Story Inside the iconic Heated Rivalry cottage on Lake Muskoka designed by a former OHL player