The route by which financier Dick Lemon came to find his island of creativity was so unlikely that even Lemon himself suspected divine intervention.

Nick Lemon is nothing if not a dreamer. The California–based mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer had long imagined a quiet inspirational getaway where he could invite creative types, such as writers, artists, and musicians, to collaborate. Despite acquiring wealth in Napa’s wine industry, Lemon was growing tired of the law and of California. Fortunately, his profession had been good to him. In 1993 he and two friends decided to buy 746 acres of vineyards from British food giant Allied Domecq and to lease the wine-growing land back to the company. The deal ensured Lemon and his friends a steady stream of income. 

The trio then incorporated under the name Silverado Partners, named for the country club where they met, and decided to try to buy Nestle’s wineries, thinking that Nestle might use its brand name better in bottled water. Working with the private equity firm Texas Pacific Group (now known as TPG Group), they bought the Nestle wine business in California for $350 million (U.S.). Silverado subsequently bought two more California wineries and, under the Beringer Wine Estates name, went public in 1997 with a valuation of $750 million (U.S.). A year later, Fosters of Australia bought the entire company for $1.2 billion (U.S.). 

Lemon had experienced success in business, and now he wanted to use the money he had made to choose creative work that interested him. However, he had no idea that in 2001 he would find his dream location in Atlantic Canada. 

“I began studying ethics because I’d been asked by a university to teach a class on legal ethics,” Lemon, now 64, recalls. “But I lost interest in the project after I met Jerusalem–based Rabbi Levi Lauer and began studying the Jewish Bible, the Torah, with him.”

Rabbi Lauer was in the habit of visiting Nova Scotia in the summers; in fact, he had become so fond of the local residents that in the summer of 2001 he decided to buy a home there. Lemon, who was fascinated by the literary and philosophical content of the Torah, accompanied him that summer and saw Long Island, one of the Five Islands group, advertised in a realtor’s office. The undeveloped 17-acre island was on sale for $75,000 (U.S.), which Lemon thought was a steal. So he bought it on the spot, sight unseen. 

“It had long been my dream of having an island you can’t get off. It was as if this God I don’t believe in had offered me my island,” explains Lemon. “I ran a chamber music series in Napa and found that musicians knew nothing about writers. I have a few friends who are painters, and they seemed to connect a bit to music but not to writers. So I had a fantasy for 15 years of owning an island where musicians, artists, and writers could get together and where they couldn’t easily get off. I imagined this island as a ‘crucible’ for creativity.” 

If buying the island (now known as Dick’s Island to the members of the small community of Lower Five Islands, between Truro and Parrsboro) was easy, developing it was a major project, complicated by the inaccessibly steep, red, sandstone cliffs and the fact that the Bay of Fundy is home to the highest tides in the world. With each tide, the deep funnel-shaped bay flushes an amount of water equal to the entire daily discharge of all the world’s rivers, creating tides that range 30 to 50 feet in a matter of hours. In this beautiful but dangerous place, Lemon’s island was only accessible at high tide in the summers for four hours a day. “It was a massive thing figuring out how to develop the island,” admits Lemon. “The cliff face rises 200 feet sheer out of the water. When we arrived, you had to climb up a rope to get on the island. It was dangerous. There was no water, power, nothing. There was nothing here.” 

The first step was for Lemon to employ retired corrections officer and Five Islands resident Dennis Ross, now 62, as project manager. “This guy’s a genius. He could run a nation. He’s a complete problem solver,” Lemon says of the genial assistant who has become a good friend. Halifax–based architectural firm Solterre Design was hired to create the house on environmentally sound principles. “The process was complicated by the fact the building site was an island 200 feet above the water with cliffs on all sides,” says architect Keith Robertson. “Materials had to be as lightweight as possible; the foundation, for instance, is made of treated wood. Everything had to be hauled up on a custom-designed crane, and we used a little excavator mounted on the front of an ATV.” 

The work was done by a team of builders and craftspeople from a 20-mile radius. Ross designed, and the team built, a steep series of wooden steps to scale the rock face. The process took two years. “It was biblical,” says Lemon, “and the greatest joy for me was working with this community.” After four years, the work is now almost complete: there is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house nestled among the trees, along with four themed cottages spread out around the island. There’s a lovers’ cottage with a bedside view of the sharp outline of Pinnacle Island and the 200-foot drop to the ocean; a boat-shaped cottage, where the view from the “prow” is also of the 200-foot drop; a jaunty red-and-white “lighthouse” cottage offers views of the thick tree-topped wedges that are Moose and Diamond Islands; and a caretaker’s cottage, which is currently occupied by caretaker Paul McKenzie and his 18-year-old son and assistant, Jeffery. 

Because the island is only accessible at high tide, visitors must time their trips carefully and take a powerboat from nearby Sand’s Wharf. The boat pulls in beside the steep cliff and the wooden landing area designed by Ross, who also designed the hydraulic lift that hauls suitcases and other heavy items up the cliff face (his first design was tough to operate and Lemon broke it, sending Ross back to the drawing board). 

Lemon is pleased with the development, although he stresses that the work hasn’t always been easy; he and Ross have had many creative disagreements over such things as whether to cut down trees and ferns or to build trails. Lemon didn’t want clean cleared trails but Ross did; they compromised by building winding boardwalks that preserve the seclusion of the cottages and allow ferns to grow up around the wood but also keep visitors’ shoes clean. 

There was a difference of opinion over the fact that the red-and-white colours of the lighthouse cottage are visible from the shore. Lemon didn’t want any of the buildings to be visible, but Ross designed the lighthouse and cut down some of the trees around it in Lemon’s absence. For the most part, the debates have been constructive. “I believe the best ideas come from differing points of view. I like differences; they create energy,” says Lemon, laughing about the fact that he had to veto Ross’s plan to incorporate a casino theme into the boathouse. “Dennis even bought slot machines but, poor guy, he had to get rid of them. I think games of chance are dogged pursuit of the wrong thing.” 

Lemon credits his business success with following his instinct for beauty; he says the same principle is influencing his island development. “A couple of decades ago, when I had no net worth, I adopted beauty as my guiding principle,” he says. “I know beauty when I feel it: the harmonic in the conference room under the dissonance, the soar of partners talking about a new project, the flashing edges of an underachieving or difficult employee who you know has more in him than he knows, the choreography of complex corporate structure. I started my commitment to beauty as a guiding principle by firing all clients I then had [politely] except for those I both liked and admired. It worked brilliantly. Those people are inordinately successful as a group, so my practice expanded.” 

The main house reflects all of this, with its odd windows, a glass floor that visually offers no support, and openness into intimate places. Lemon believes that everything important involves paradox. “Beauty and paradox describe what worked for me in business and what I’ve tried to integrate in my home at Five Islands,” he says. Lemon initially asked Solterre to design a home that was “small, simple, odd—personal, not conventional,” but he admits he undercut that. “But Solterre were tolerant,” he says, laughing.

The home also has odd “holes” that allow unexpected views. Lemon was specific about where he wanted the idiosyncratic windows and holes. “I wanted introversion and private space, as in the reading areas, which I’ve put adjacent to the living room because sometimes I like to be near people but not with them. I thought there should be consciousness of change from one zone to another, although I like ambiguity. I think a small window often has more power than a large one. Sometimes the windows and holes make no sense, but they create a light source in an otherwise dead area of a room. I like windows at eye level so that when I lie in bed, I can look right out and feel the fresh air.” 

Upstairs, in the open-plan glass-floored reading area, Lemon designed the three stacked windows to create “a sense of uplift, like a triplet in music between other sounds.” In the contemporary kitchen, Ross munches on some wine gums as he heats up the fish chowder he made and boated over from the mainland. Ross describes Lemon as “different, in the way he wanted to do things. For example, I wanted to use a helicopter to get materials here, but he insisted we use local labour, so I designed a barge. He sees himself as a member of the community. The other day he said, ‘Does our fire hall need painting?’

I noticed his use of ‘our.’ People here have warmed to that; he’s not Mr. Lemon.  He’s Dick.” 

Lemon’s link with the community was strengthened when he inaugurated the first Not Since Moses run on July 7. Several hundred runners took part in the five- and 10-kilometre races that began and ended at Dick’s Island. Runners were ferried out to the island early in the morning by locals using their own boats, then, once low tide arrived about six hours later, local volunteers took up posts along the routes so visitors could safely run on the temporarily revealed ocean floor. Proceeds went to the Five Islands Volunteer Fire Department. 

Lemon feels a profound link with the island’s beauty. “It goes back to a time I’ve never consciously experienced, before birth, perhaps,” he says. “The ferns, the green, the wet.” Now he intends to invite local musicians, writers, and artists to devise innovative programs for the island. “I want to get other people involved. The island’s creativity is a precious resource that should be invested in important human processes.”