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Published 10:51 am Tuesday, May 5, 2026<\/p>\n
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Fernie\u2019s historic hotel The Royal is being refurbished into a boutique overnight lodging for adventure tourists, after plans for the project were initially sidelined during the pandemic.<\/p>\n
Mountain Riders Lodging and Castleavery Hospitality are resurrecting the iconic Fernie building, located downtown on 501 1 Ave., transforming it into a modern 24-room hotel.<\/p>\n
The companies are in discussion with the City, seeking a Heritage Alternation Permit, with the goal of starting construction later this summer and opening in 2027.<\/p>\n
Plans for the building envision a lounge and restaurant on the main floor, and a bar on the roof with a 360 degree view of the mountains. Down in the basement, there\u2019d be storage for outdoor equipment, including ski lockers.<\/p>\n
Plans for the revitalization of the Royal have been a decade in the making. Andrew Cockburn, president of Mountain Riders Lodging, said the project began to gain steam in 2019 but lost traction during Covid and struggled to regain footing due to lingering inflation. It wasn\u2019t until last year the project kicked back into motion.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a really long road. We bought it in April 2019. We ran it as a going concern until Covid hit. That was a really challenging time for everybody,\u201d said Cockburn.<\/p>\n
\u201cThree years ago, interest rates really started to tick up. Once that started to settle, which was around this time last year, we said \u2018ok let\u2019s move forward,\u2019\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Cockburn, who currently lives in Calgary, was always interested in starting up a business in a mountain town, and he saw an opportunity to introduce boutique-style accommodation in Fernie.<\/p>\n
Built in 1909, Cockburn said The Royal initially served as a hotel for railway travellers. The building that still stands today is actually the second Royal hotel, since the original burned down in Fernie\u2019s big fire not long before.<\/p>\n
Cockburn said the project team has sought expertise from a heritage consultant in order to preserve the historic facade of the building. They plan to keep the painted mural and the building\u2019s original signage on the side of the hotel.<\/p>\n
The new hotel will be a draw for adventure-seeking tourists year-round, with both regular rooms and suites for booking.<\/p>\n
\u201cTourists can come and have a meeting place and really get to know each other and tell stories about their adventures of the day,\u201d said Cockburn.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source rosslandnews.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Work resumes on revival of Fernie\u2019s historic Royal Hotel Published 10:51 am Tuesday, May 5, 2026 Fernie\u2019s historic hotel The Royal is being refurbished into a boutique overnight lodging for adventure tourists, after plans for the project were initially sidelined during the pandemic. Mountain Riders Lodging and Castleavery Hospitality are resurrecting the iconic Fernie building, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2403952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2403951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Work-resumes-on-revival-of-Fernies-historic-Royal-Hotel.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2403951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2403951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2403951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2403953,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2403951\/revisions\/2403953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2403952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2403951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2403951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2403951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}