The Reinvention Of Debbie Travis

Just over 10 years ago, at her 50th birthday party in Montreal, Debbie Travis had an a-ha moment. The UK-born decor television star was surrounded by family and friends when she was struck by a thought: I want to do something different.

At that point, Travis had spent 20 successful years in television, published nine books and created a decor line for Canadian Tire. (If you’ve ever sponge painted a wall, you have Travis to thank.) She and her husband, Hans Rosenstein, had been exploring Italy together ever since they filmed a few episodes of the wildly popular Debbie Travis’ Painted House series there. They dreamed of buying a vacation home in Tuscany.

That same year, she was on stage at an event in Vancouver when the interviewer asked her what was next for Debbie Travis. Without hesitating, she said she wanted to invite women to her Tuscan villa to do yoga, drink wine and take long walks through olive groves. By the end of the interview, audience members were asking Travis where they could sign up.

That Travis did not own a Tuscan villa and had never led a retreat were not stumbling blocks. Nor was the fact that she was about to start hosting All For One, a big-budget reality series for CBC, in which she travelled across the country and worked with different communities on construction projects. 

Putting her dream out into the universe, so to speak, was energizing. “My television career had started to feel like déja vu, but now it felt like I was plugged in again,” says Travis, whose newly released memoir, Laugh More: Stories From An Unexpected Life, is a sweet and often hilarious recounting of her many lives. The book includes myriad tales, from Travis’ modelling days in 1980s London to moving to Montreal—where she raised her family, started a home decor business and became a television star—and finally to Tuscany, where (spoiler alert) she now lives with her husband and their border collie, Billie.

Shortly after the Vancouver event, Travis and Rosenstein purchased a Tuscan villa. That same year, Travis led her first Tuscan Girls’ Getaway at a nearby rental. It turned out to be a natural extension of her television work. “I was never a professional decorator,” she says, “but I could inspire people.”

After five years of renovations—during which Travis was still travelling back and forth to Canada for All For One—she welcomed her first retreat guests to her 100-acre estate for a week filled with wine tastings, cooking classes, guided hikes and yoga. “We get women from all walks of life,” says Travis. “But what they often have in common is that they’re going through a change, whether it’s widowhood, or divorce or not being happy where they are,” she says.  

Debbie Travis leading a cooking tutorial at one of her Tuscan Girls' Getaways. (Photo: Daniella Cesarei Photography)

Unsurprisingly, the retreats are often a catalyst for transformation. “We want to revitalize their passion,” says Travis, who constantly receives emails from past guests who say the getaways have changed their lives. “But it takes a while to make the leap.”

She speaks from experience: Years before Travis moved to Tuscany, she made vision boards with photos of a palazzo with arches and a table tucked under an olive tree. After she put her two young sons to bed in Montreal, she transported herself back to Italy through Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun. (The 1996 memoir chronicles Mayes’ adventures restoring an abandoned villa in Cortona.)

“I was so excited by her reality,” says Travis. “I thought, one day I’ll have this.” 

Villa Reniella, Debbie Travis’ Tuscan villa. (Photo: Patrick Biller)

What Travis learned from making her big leap was the subject of 2018’s Design Your Next Chapter. In the book, she asks readers to make lists of why they can and cannot do something. “The list of why you can’t do something will be very long,” she says—until you start eliminating those reasons. 

“Dreaming can be a hobby; people always say to me, Oh, I was going to do that,” says Travis. “But if you want to do something, you need to go and do it.”

Aside from a new calling, Travis has also found a tightknit community of expats and locals in Tuscany. “This place is a time warp,” she says. “People live how our grandparents lived. There is so much joy in the simplicity of life.” 

She recalls a time when she got lost while driving and stopped to ask an old man for directions—instead of just telling her how to get where she needed to go, he hopped in the back seat of her car and directed her to her destination. (“If this had happened in Toronto,” she jokes, “you would call the police.”) She also once caught an elderly woman picking walnuts from trees on Travis’ property. Travis soon discovered the woman had planted those trees as a child, and had been picking them for 70 years. The two are now friends, the walnut picking continues and Travis receives a walnut cake in thanks every Christmas. 

Community is also a core component of Travis’ retreats. “There’s a lot of laughing here, probably due to the wine, and a lot of story telling,” she says. “The camaraderie among the women is so strong, you can feel the energy.” Travis once came across two guests who had just met that week—one in her 40s, the other in her 60s—holding hands and engrossed in deep conversation. “Community is the most important thing for health,” says Travis. (She’s not wrong: Prolonged loneliness can have significant negative health impacts.)

Of course, it’s easy to make time for deep connection when you’re completely unplugged from the daily grind. “Guests are always asking me, ‘How do I bring this home?,’” says Travis. That question inspired her to write 2021’s Joy: Life Lessons From A Tuscan Villa, with chapters on how to build community, rediscover purpose and find pleasure in food.

After the success of Design Your Next Chapter and Joy—both bestsellers—Travis started working on Laugh More. As the title suggests, her sense of humour is on full display throughout. One especially funny anecdote involves the time a twentysomething Travis and a friend made leather skirts held together by glue instead of stitches; the skirts fell apart at the tail end of a long night of dancing. Another more recent tale involves spotting a snake in a guest’s room at the very moment the guest mentions she is terrified of snakes. (Travis surreptitiously flings it out of the room and the guest is none the wiser.) 

To be sure, there were no snakes on Travis’s vision board. But otherwise, there’s an uncanny resemblance between the life she desired and the one she’s living now—her Tuscan home has multiple arches as well as an olive grove; Frances Mayes lives one town over. “I thought, if she could do it, I could do it,” says Travis. “We all need people to inspire us.”

It’s enough to make anyone start a vision board.