The first time Jade Lehti was offered the opportunity to run what would become The Grand Hall, she said no.

It was 2023 and Lehti was walking through Chilliwack's District 1881 with members of the Chilliwack Arts Council. The group was preparing for the mural festival, and Phil Algra, one of the brothers behind the redevelopment of the downtown district, was showing them potential walls for artists.

At some point, Algra took the group upstairs.

The space was unfinished—no drywall yet, Lehti remembers—but Algra explained that it was going to become an event venue. Lehti, whose background was in community events, told him it sounded beautiful and much needed. She'd be happy to hold events there once it opened.

That wasn't quite what Algra was asking.

“He's like, ‘No, do you want it?’” Lehti remembers.

Her answer was essentially: you've got to be kidding.

Running her own venue was something Lehti had described to her then-fiancé, Cory, as a “10-year borderline pipe dream.” Suddenly somebody was offering her one.

And she had turned him down without even asking what it would take.

“It really started to bug me that I had said no without asking any questions,” she recalls.

Not long after, Lehti was having brunch with a friend at The Offy, downstairs in District 1881, when she noticed Algra sitting by himself at the bar.

This time, she wasn't going to walk away.

On her way out, Lehti approached him and admitted she had been kicking herself over their earlier conversation. How, she asked, could she find out more?

That question eventually led to another meeting, then business plans, financing conversations and, ultimately, two businesses that would alter the direction of Lehti's life.

Standing inside The Grand Hall nearly three years later, the whole thing still seems to surprise her a little.

The ballroom occupies an upper floor of District 1881, its tall arched windows overlooking the neighbourhood below. Over the past year, the business has expanded into adjacent space, adding smaller rooms that can accommodate meetings, bridal parties and events that don't need the scale of the main hall.

Lehti walks me through the rooms while describing what still needs to be done.

“There’s a few, I don't know, missing pieces,” she says. “You always see what you're working towards.”

That might be as good an explanation as any for how she arrived here in the first place.

Lehti was born in Abbotsford and has spent essentially her entire working life around hospitality. There were restaurant jobs, food service, bartending and several years working in banquets at the Ramada in Abbotsford. She studied hospitality, tourism and event planning, then headed toward Vancouver, believing—as plenty of young Fraser Valley professionals have—that was where the interesting opportunities were.

COVID interrupted that trajectory.

Lehti wasn't particularly interested in becoming a virtual event producer, so she shifted. Through connections formed while volunteering with TEDx Abbotsford, she ended up working with Josh Vanderheide on what was then Local Food Supply Co., a pandemic-era business created to connect Fraser Valley producers with customers at a time when restaurants and farmers markets had suddenly disappeared.

Lehti had never worked in grocery or retail. She took on supplier relationships, ordering and inventory anyway.

“It seems this would be great to be a part of something from the beginning,” she recalls thinking.

She says the experience gave her “a bit of a bug”—the appeal of helping something new take shape.

By the time life began returning to normal, Lehti was moving back toward events and working independently. But she was also thinking differently about where those events needed to happen.

She had moved to Chilliwack and started noticing what wasn't there.

“There’s so much that isn't happening in the Valley yet,” she says. Events and experiences existed in Vancouver and elsewhere, but Fraser Valley residents were often travelling west to participate in them.

“Why don't we host some of these out here and get some more stuff going?”

Her entry into Chilliwack's community was fast.

She joined Rotary, and through that, she met a local council candidate who needed a campaign manager. That led to more introductions. At Creative Third Thursday, she met people involved with the Chilliwack Arts Council and Chilliwack Pride Society. She eventually chaired the Pride board and joined the Arts Council board.

It was the Arts Council's mural festival that put her on that walk with Phil Algra.

In hindsight, the route looks almost linear.

Living it, Lehti says, didn't feel that way.

She even bristles slightly at the idea of “networking,” at least in its traditional business-card-swapping sense. What she does enjoy is hearing what other people want to create and figuring out whether she can help make it happen.

“If there's a way that we're both kind of working towards something complementary, or there's a way that I can help or support what someone is bringing to life, or provide a space for something that wouldn't maybe happen otherwise,” she says, “then, yeah, it's been nice.”

That philosophy now underpins businesses Lehti initially wasn't sure she could take on at all.

When she followed up with the Algras, she discovered the opportunity was larger than the ballroom. The family wanted Hotel Morado, then still under development nearby, and the event venue to be operated together.

For the Algras, the businesses could complement each other.

For Lehti, there was one complication: she really wanted the venue. She wasn't dreaming about becoming a hotelier.

She went home to Cory.

He had spent more than a decade working as an electrician and was ready for something different. They started running the numbers. The couple borrowed money from family and worked with the Algras to find a structure that made the businesses possible.

In the summer of 2023, Lehti was still juggling independent event work—Taste of Abby, Mill Lake Park, a hospice gala and other contracts—while preparing to launch businesses she had never operated before.

And planning her own wedding. The timing became almost comical.

The Grand Hall was ready just in time for Lehti and Cory to use it for their own wedding reception. They effectively broke in their future business themselves, went on their honeymoon and came back to open it publicly.

The first public event was held October 19, 2023. Hotel Morado followed in April 2024.

Then Lehti did something that runs against a lot of entrepreneurial instinct: she tried not to attract too much attention. There was no giant opening campaign designed to immediately fill every date. Her thinking was, “We haven't actually operated these businesses before.”

She wanted time to learn what guests would ask for, how events would flow and where the problems were before aggressively trying to scale demand. The businesses grew largely through word of mouth while the team refined what they were offering.

The goal, she says, was maintaining a high standard rather than simply filling the calendar.

The calendar filled anyway.

The Grand Hall hosted just over 160 events in 2025, according to Lehti, and was trending toward roughly 190 in 2026 when we spoke. Hundreds of events have now taken place in the ballroom, well over 100 of them weddings.

Couples who married there have returned for other events. Guests at one wedding have later booked another for their own family.

Even inside the hall, Lehti is careful about putting too much of herself into the room. The ballroom has to remain enough of a blank canvas that someone else can walk in and imagine their wedding, celebration, meeting, film screening or dance night there.

But Hotel Morado turned out to be different. “The hotel crept up on me,” she says.

Originally, it was the thing she needed to take on to get the event venue. But the hotel gave her something the hall couldn't: permission to make more choices on behalf of the guest. “You get to be a bit more personal with it,” she says. “You kind of get to bring a bit more personality and intention.”

That increasingly means making Hotel Morado feel less like an anonymous accommodation and more like an introduction to Chilliwack.

Lehti wants rotating local art on the walls. A bookshelf already combines local authors with favourites pulled from her own shelves. The hotel's contactless model means guests may encounter fewer staff members than at a conventional property, which, in Lehti's mind, makes the personality embedded in everything else even more important.

She talks about directing people toward nearby coffee shops, fishing guides and local experiences. Eventually, she sees opportunities to create small retreats that combine rooms at the hotel, meetings at The Grand Hall and more casual social gatherings elsewhere in the property.

“We want to be able to provide not just the accommodations but the full experience,” she says.

Eventually, our conversation moves upstairs. We step onto a rooftop patio that Lehti and her team are still figuring out how to use. There is a barbecue connected to natural gas, retractable awnings and space for smaller gatherings overlooking District 1881.

Lehti can already picture dinners, cocktail hours, wedding photos and intimate events up here.

It is another unfinished idea. Which, for her, seems to be part of the fun.

At The Grand Hall, she describes the broader mission with three words: “celebrate, educate, and create.”

Weddings cover the obvious celebration piece. But Lehti also wants the hall to hold civic conversations, nonprofit events, creative collaborations and experiences that somebody else has an idea for but nowhere to put.

Earlier this year, the team held civic nights bringing people into conversation with those involved in politics and policy. They have hosted dances and film screenings.

And then there was Soup du Jour. Lehti's rationale for creating a soup-tasting event was not particularly complicated.

She really likes soup.

But the idea became something bigger: local caterers gained a chance to put their food in front of the public, guests got an event that hadn't existed in Chilliwack before, and proceeds supported Bowls of Hope.

“If one event can kind of bridge multiple organizations or communities,” she says, that's the kind of thing she wants to keep doing.

It is tempting to look backward now and turn Lehti's story into a neat entrepreneurial plan: years of hospitality experience, community involvement, relationships, an opportunity, then two businesses.

She doesn't describe it that way. Her five-year planning has become a little looser since taking all this on. For much of the first couple of years, she says, the feeling was closer to: We can't fail. Just keep going.

“It’s not that we haven't done this before,” she remembers thinking. “We just haven't done it before on the scale yet.” But something has shifted.

We're standing above downtown Chilliwack, on another space Jade Lehti hasn't entirely decided what to do with yet, talking about businesses she once assumed were years beyond her reach.

After hundreds of events, more than 100 weddings and two years of hotel guests, the pipe dream doesn't feel quite so hypothetical anymore.

“Now we're coming up, you know, two years hotel, three years hall,” she says, “and it's starting to feel like, oh yeah, no, we're doing it.”

The woman who instinctively said no has had some time to reconsider.