If New York’s elite have traditionally flocked to the Hamptons for their summer escapes, Canada’s Muskoka region has emerged as a worthy counterpart to the north. This idyllic lakeside area is famous for its charming gingerbread cottages, private docks, and its own prestigious ‘Billionaire’s Row’.

Notable regulars include Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, along with Justin and Hailey Bieber. Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber frequently delight fans with pictures from their lakeside abode. Just last year, David and Victoria Beckham also visited, bringing along their family and Elvis star Austin Butler to enjoy what Posh Spice described as ‘perfect Muskoka’.

Just over two hours from Toronto, Muskoka is known for its mirror-like lakes, thick forests and ice-cream-colored villages. 

Locals call it ‘cottage country’, but its accessibility and seclusion have made it a magnet for the jet-set.

The shores of Lake Muskoka are lined with multi-million-dollar properties, while nearby Lakes Joseph and Rosseau are equally popular. This transformation has made the area one of Canada’s most desirable destinations, often lovingly dubbed ‘The Hamptons of the North’ or ‘The Malibu of the North’.

But that exclusivity and tranquility are now at the center of a fierce battle. Russian-born developer Kirill Soloviev, through Cliff Bay Muskoka Corp, has pitched an 83-acre mega-resort on the site of the former Muskoka Regional Centre, once a tuberculosis sanatorium that has now sat abandonned.

The glossy proposal promises two six-storey hotels, 28 boathouse-style villas, branded residences, a spa, banquet halls, staff housing, multi-storey parking garages, two beaches and as many as 1,378 residential units. Plans also include 2,272 parking spaces and a marina with more than 80 boat slips.

Renderings show chic restaurants and villas rising out of the bay itself, built on towering stilts like a Balinese fantasy. His team has boasted the design would be ‘unique in Ontario’.

According to the Financial Post, the 43-year-old moved to Canada at 19 with his truck-driver father and retail-worker mother. 

He now works out of a modest office above a suburban Toronto home-improvement center that sells hot tubs and antiques – an unlikely headquarters for a man pushing a billion-dollar vision.

He never owned a cottage himself, something he says makes him sympathetic to families priced out of Muskoka’s multimillion-dollar shoreline. 

‘This project will give people the possibility to either own something that’s on a lake that’s not in the millions or even rent it,’ he told the paper.

At a public Zoom meeting, more than 250 residents asked him to name past developments. 

He offered only vague answers, with other team members stepping in to speak for him. 

He has also floated ideas of 3D printing, modular construction and even blockchain tokenization as ways to fund and build the resort.

‘We are not going to build five cottages,’ he said. ‘At the end of the day, we’re doing something that’s creating jobs, creating destination revenues, creating tourism.’

The bigger flashpoint is Queen’s Park weighing a Minister’s Zoning Order (MZO) to fast-track the project.

That prospect has ignited fury, with a petition opposing the resort already drawing more than 4,500 signatures.

Gravenhurst Mayor Heidi Lorenz told Daily Mail that because the developer is pursuing an MZO, ‘the town has no approval role. The MZO process overrides local planning authority’.

She said council has not taken a position on the project. ‘Revisions to the proposal are now taking place and public feedback from the July information session will be considered as part of the next iteration,’ she explained, adding that councillors will only debate the plan once a revised application is formally submitted.

The mayor stressed Gravenhurst has long hoped to see the derelict property redeveloped: ‘Council would like to see the property developed and put to productive use. This is something we put into our 2023-2027 strategic plan and the town has been advocating for its sale for decades. However, council has taken no position on what actually takes place at the site or the current proposal to date.’

Meanwhile, the Muskoka Lakes Association (MLA), which represents more than 2,000 lakefront families, has filed detailed objections running dozens of pages.

Its president, Ken Pearce, knows the cottage life firsthand. His parents once had a family place in the Kawartha Lakes, and after a long career as a corporate lawyer in Toronto, he was able to buy his own spot on Lake Muskoka’s western shore.

Pearce told Daily Mail the single biggest concern is simple: the pipes, sewage lines and overwater villas and restaurants planned on stilts in the bay.

‘You just don’t do that. Nobody’s allowed to do that,’ Pearce said. ‘With 80 acres, there’s plenty of room to build. You don’t have to take down every tree. You don’t have to build right at the water’s edge.’

At the heart of local fury are proposals for cottages and restaurants built directly in Muskoka Bay – a design more common in tropical resorts like the Maldives and Bali than northern Canada.

Pearce says such construction defies Ontario’s own rules, which prohibit dwellings within floodplains and mandate at least a 30-meter setback from the shoreline.

The Cliff Bay plan pushes buildings as close as 7.5 meters from the water – and, in some cases, straight into the bay.

‘These lakes flood from time to time in the spring,’ he said. ‘You’re prohibited from having development in the lake other than boathouses. They’re talking about building these things on stilts if you can believe it. It would be utterly ridiculous.’

The MLA warns the overwater villas would scar the shoreline, invade privacy, and carry sewage and water lines over open water. 

Noise, they argue, would travel across the narrow bay ‘unmitigated’ to neighboring cottages.

Residents also fear the project would destroy Muskoka’s vital shoreline buffer – the strip of trees and vegetation that prevents erosion and filters road salt runoff in winter – leaving pollutants to wash straight into the lake.

‘Our members talk about the view from the canoe,’ Pearce added. ‘If there are no trees, if the shoreline is blasted away and dotted with overwater villas, that’s not Muskoka anymore.’

There is also skepticism about Soloviev’s job promises. The project has been pitched as generating 700 year-round jobs, but the Association argues the plan leans heavily on residential condos rather than commercial resort space.

They want guarantees that hotels, restaurants and amenities would be built in the first phase, with future residential construction tied to commercial build-out.

Otherwise, Pearce says, ‘we just don’t believe that’s what they want to do,’ pointing to other Ontario projects where hotels were promised but never built.

Locals point to billionaire Mitchell Goldhar’s scaled-down redevelopment of nearby Clevelands House as proof a gentler touch is possible – and note no such white knight has stepped in to tame Cliff Bay.

For Gravenhurst itself, the calculus is different. Nearly a third of residents are seniors, many households survive on less than $40,000 a year, and the derelict site brings in no taxes. 

A mega-resort could deliver millions in new revenue and hundreds of jobs – one reason the town council is under pressure to back it.

Pearce insists residents aren’t against redevelopment. The site has sat abandoned since the 1990s, the derelict hospital buildings riddled with asbestos. ‘Redevelopment is fine,’ he said. ‘But this proposal? It needs major changes.’

In its formal submission to Ontario’s housing minister, the MLA concluded that the Cliff Bay plan ‘is not in conformity with the Town Official Plan or the Town Comprehensive Zoning By-law’ and urged that the shoreline villas be ‘drastically reduced or eliminated’.

Daily Mail has reached out to Cliff Bay Resorts and Residences for comment.