Founder's Notes — Issue No. 1

The half we found our home, and where we are taking it next.

A mid-year letter from Mya, founder of Ralia. July 2026.

This February, we held the first Ralia town hall we have ever held.

I had invited everyone who built Ralia through 2025 and into 2026 to come and hear who we are, where we are going, and everything we had to celebrate from our first full year running both an event space and a ten bedroom hotel experience, well.

We went around the room, division by division — hospitality, event and bar, eco cleaning, finance, wellness — and we landed one idea together: everyone is responsible for the feeling a person feels when they walk through our doors. Everyone contributes.

Then we opened the floor. And the word that came up, the one that has stayed with me all year, that defines what Ralia is about, was safety.

One of the women on our cleaning team, someone who had been working quietly and beautifully as part of our team, spoke about the enormous sense of safety she felt inside the company. Safety to be herself, to try things, to bring her expertise.

That is the whole reason Ralia exists.

We are not here to focus on profit alone. We are here to be a solution inside the systems we work in, and our solution is to be human, to hold honest relationships, and to build spaces where people feel safe to be one hundred percent themselves.

Hold onto that word. It is the thread through everything below, all the way to where we are going.

What Ralia is today

Ralia is a hotel and retail building management company. We take care of spaces and make them truly work for the people who value them.

At the heart of Ralia is our Montreal flagship, which got its official name this year, La Maison Ralia, the “house” of Ralia. Inside are 4 apartments that together make it a 10 bedroom boutique hotel. Out back is a large terrace with a ten person dry sauna that is delicious in the winter and turns social and vibrant with plants in the summer, the kind of shared reset our city is falling in love with. On the ground floor is Connections, a one hundred person events space we treat as the most beautiful conference room a hotel could have, and it has held networking nights, baby showers, live podcasts, workshops, yoga, run clubs, merch launches and photo shoots. We also manage a retail and residential building, and we operate La Villa Ralia, our home on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

We started 2026 with 2 and a half full time members of our team and a circle of consultants. We reached the halfway mark having more than doubled the team. We do not have a traditional head office, La Maison Ralia has quietly become our home base, and the space has been teaching us how to work as much as we have been molding it into a powerful work place.

The wins we are proudest of in 2026

The biggest is ralia.ca.

We started the building’s operations being known as the Connections Event Space and then in a really fun twist, the Human Design Hotel, rather than as Ralia. We realized by the end of the year that we had created more confusion than we wanted. So, we slowed almost all of our marketing in the first half of the year to tell our story from a place of clarity.

We combed through the brand, our colours, our purpose, the people we are here for: conscious travellers, and the local seekers here in Montreal who care about wellbeing, about the environment, and about the people around them.

Then we spent 4 months building one website that connects our whole ecosystem, with our free Human Design mini reading living right inside it. It is launched, we are proud of what we accomplished!

We also gave Ralia a voice, literally. The Voice of Ralia is now on Spotify, beginning with our activators, the local Montrealers who shaped our hotel rooms. There is much more of our voice to come too — many stories to tell, many experiences to share with you!

The surprises that showed us a window into what is to come…

Two guests this year quietly pointed at our future.

The first was a team retreat we hosted in house using Dode meditation pods, dodecahedron shaped pods you step into to sit, breathe and be present. We spent a day moving in and out of them, and what surprised me was how grounded we felt simply being in the building together.

The second was a large venture capital fund that asked us to give the women in their company the experience we had been building at co-working: nervous system regulation, and Human Design as a tool for giving yourself permission to be yourself, to be safe. Notice the theme again.

We have also hosted offsites for tech teams. People who often work remote, who rarely have access to an environment built to regulate a nervous system, and who, in the early chapters of building a company, are either not ready to take on the stress of a lease or it is impractical based on where people live.

That is the door we are walking through next.

Where we are going, the part to remember

Work Well co-working was born this year, and it was born inside our La Maison Ralia sauna turned into a social sauna. Josef Kasz invited me to a social sauna back in 2025, and it took until January 2026 for us to sit in the heat together. I had told my team co-working was a later this year project. Josef energized me, I energized him, and by February we had opened it to the public. We ran it as a monthly beta through the first half, and we are now offering it every two weeks, with sound activations and a curated pairing of sound, smell, light, touch and taste. It is the most intentional co-working experience for wellbeing I have ever seen.

Alongside it, we are launching the Cafe of Dreams. When two cafe chapters in our buildings came to a close over the winter, we chose to ideate rather than replace. My own background is in nutrition, years of it with professional athletes, and I am bringing that to Cafe Ralia: the best coffee, food that genuinely nourishes and steadies your mood, and an environment where your stress comes down and peace and joy have room to return. Cafe Ralia opens in two Montreal locations in the second half of 2026.

Here is where all of it is heading.

By 2027, co-working at Ralia happens every week, and we are building a way to join us remotely so there is something for people anywhere in the world. And for companies, we want La Maison Ralia to become your office. An office built for working well, without a stressful lease. A space that frees your team from the pressure of always being on, and from signing away your capital before you are ready. Come take over the building once or twice a quarter, and watch what amplifies when your people work, connect and reset in a space designed for them.

Make La Maison Ralia your office. Make it a home for your business to grow.

The people who made this half

None of this is solo work. With gratitude to Desiree Ruiz, who held up the event space almost single handedly. To Cindy Charles, who continued to ground and build our eco cleaning team and our special Ralia rituals as a customer service offering to guests. To Rowena Bonyad, who brought ease to our financial flow and helped us see ourselves in the success we are building (I cannot stress enough how much it matters to know your numbers). To Dunia Darwiche, who is building our new, authentic way of marketing Ralia. And to Drea Gideon, who built our website. The first half of 2026 has been rocking.

What people are feeling in the space

We crossed more than two hundred five star reviews across our spaces this year, an average of five out of five. A few of the voices behind that number:

“Spent the day coworking at La Maison Ralia for their Work Well event and it is a beautiful space to get focused work done, while also building connections. Especially enjoyed the guided nervous system resets that helped to get my creative juices flowing effortlessly.”

— Laura Abate

“Our group of 10 came together for a team connect and quarterly review, and this property exceeded every expectation. The wellness experience was a highlight, especially the private sauna. The mix of work, wellness, and play was exactly what we needed.”

— Ishaan

“If you’re like me and you’re looking for co-working opportunities to change up your environment, to be surrounded by inspiring people, Work Well at Ralia really had it all for me.”

— Catherine Paquette

“Connections is beyond a space, it is a movement, a center that connects you to the heart and soul of community.”

— Kimiko Fujimoto

The invitation

If you want to feel this for yourself, join our co-working updates. We are building a way to take part remotely, so soon there will be a way in for everyone, wherever you are.

And if you are a business leader looking for an alternative to the traditional office, I would love to hear from you directly. You could become one of our 2026 Companies on our Wall of Work Well Honours, and make La Maison Ralia your team’s third home.

Reach us at reservations@ralia.ca.

Here is to a second half built with intention.

Mya
Founder, Ralia