About the brand
Ode is a love letter in hotel form — to Toronto, to the Little Portugal neighbourhood that raised its founders, and to the family that built it. Opened in 2021 by Erica Herbert and her four children (Tiffany, Chanelle, Brittney and Nicholas Ramsubick), it is Toronto's only Black-owned hotel: a 10-room, family-run boutique on Dundas West, in a building their late father purchased decades ago. Herbert immigrated from Tobago at eleven; the hotel is what that family's Canadian story built. Every room carries the neighbourhood's textures and the family's intention. Ode's significance runs beyond hospitality: it's proof of whose stories get to occupy prime Toronto real estate. In a boutique-hotel market full of concepts, Ode is the one that's actually about something.
