A few years ago, after taking in a show at the Stratford Festival, I tossed and turned in a fusty room in an historic hotel that featured decor straight out of grandma’s house circa 1970. So needless to say, when I returned to Stratford at the end of August last year, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor as I surveyed my suite at the mod and glam Hotel Julie. 

The city, named in the early 1830s after the Bard’s birthplace in England, is home to many historic edifices that accommodate some 325,000 theatre-goers every year. But, up until now, its boutique hotels could be described as quaintly charming, or even contemporary but bland. 

Hotel Julie – which takes its name from Romeo’s lover, Juliet – has nine suites that are a coordinated riot of colour, pattern, texture and one-of-a-kind vintage pieces. Flat 6 – also known as the Hot Tamale room for the spicy red paint that covers the walls, ceiling and even the window frames – is one of the luxe suites in the inn, which was originally a strip of small row houses built in 1890. It was purchased in 2022 by former Stratford paramedics Paula McFarlane and Jake Tayler, renovated from top to bottom and opened to guests in August 2023. You can see how it all unfolded on Staying Inn: Hotel Julie, a 10-part series on CTV Life channel that follows creative director Autumn Hachey of Toronto’s Stay Home design company and her team as they bring her vision of “a modern twist on a Shakespeare classic” to life.  

Even though I forgot to bring my pillow, I slept like a baby in the queen bed with its down pillows, cushy memory foam mattress, organic Tuck sheets and the wall-mounted heat pump (which allowed me to control the temperature of the room with a remote). The bed has a nine-foot wide, custom-made wiggle edge headboard covered in light gold velvet, a fully functional mini-kitchen, a show-stopping dining table made from Italian Verde Luana marble and a dusty blue velvet Huggy swivel chair from Australian designer Sarah Ellison.

The idea is to entice guests to return again and again to experience different suites, says McFarlane, who says the two most-rented flats are 2 – the smallest, with a queen bed tucked into 176 square feet – and 7, the largest at 632 square feet, with two bedrooms and two ensuite bathrooms. But her personal favourite is 5, the Honeymoon Suite, with its moody purple walls and exposed brick, king-sized bed, heart-shaped tub and solid marble sink that weighs 1,500 pounds and required special bracing to hang. 

Although the whole place is an homage to Shakespeare, it doesn’t hit you over the head. Fluted lamp shades and light fixtures echo frilly Elizabethan collars, and McFarlane says the beautiful floral House of Hackney wallpaper in the bathroom of my suite features nightshade, a.k.a. belladonna, the poisonous plant supposedly taken by Juliet in the final act of Romeo and Juliet. The wallpaper’s pattern is repeated in other rooms – on the upholstery for the grand  semi-circular couch in the Honeymoon suite (in green tones), for example, and on the headboard in Flat 1, in gold tones.

“There aren’t a lot of hotels on the market where you come in and every suite’s different, or you get all these [design] details,” she says. “Most places have this grand entrance and the beautiful lobby and marble everywhere. And then you get to your room and it’s just a room. It’s nice, but it’s nothing fancy.”

Guests are given door codes for electronic keypads, the hotel guide is viewed by scanning a QR code and you can listen to specially curated Spotify playlists on the wireless in-house speakers. 

McFarlane hopes Hotel Julie’s modern edge will encourage a new generation to discover theatre, just as she has since the hotel’s opening. “I have a new appreciation for the theatre, for sure. It could be because I’m getting older, too. I worked here for 13 years, and the only time we went to the festival was on a call. Like, someone fainted or they needed an ambulance.”

MacFarlane is banking on Millennials – which she calls the “YOLO (you only live once) generation” – who like to spend their money on experiences, and older theatre-goers, who will appreciate the savings afforded by making their own meals in mini-kitchens like mine, which has an 18-inch Bosch dishwasher, an oven, an under-the-counter fridge with a freezer and a microwave.

As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: “To sleep – perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!” Four hundred years later, I’m slumbering like a baby on a memory-foam mattress, in organic sheets, under a wall-mounted heat pump that I adjusted with a remote to my preferred temperature. 

Rates start at $161 for Flat 2, $389 for Flat 5 and $390 for Flat 7. Go to hoteljulie.com for more information.