There seems to be little she hasn’t thought of. Consider, for example, the punts: small wooden rowboats that once dotted the harbor. One day, Cobb’s brother pointed out to her that there were only a handful of people on the island who still knew how to build them, and they were getting along in years. “Do you realize we’re eight funerals away from never being able to build another punt on Fogo Island?” he said. So Tony set up a punt-building program and, to keep the effort from becoming irrelevant, established a yearly race between Fogo Island and nearby Change Islands, a solution both ingenious and extremely popular.

Whether the rest of her plans will prove as effective remains to be seen. As it stands, the project is in medias res: four of the six studios have been built, and the Inn itself should be finished by November.

All of them were designed by Todd Saunders, an up-and-coming architect who’s as close to local as it’s possible to get. Born and raised in Gander, the nearest town with an airport, he now lives in Norway. But like so many Newfoundlanders, what he wanted most was an excuse to go back home. When Cobb first contacted him, on his cellphone as he was kayaking in a fjord, he said he blurted out, “I was waiting for this call. ”

It was an unusual commission. “I had to make modern architecture the way a Newfoundlander would,” Saunders said. “Scandinavian design has a refinement to it, but Tilting’s got this ugly beauty.” To an outsider, Tilting, like the other towns, is more jolie than laide, but it has simplicity and consistency. If there’s been any new residential construction on the island in a century, you wouldn’t know it, and the buildings that exist look much like what you’d get if you asked a 6-year-old to draw a house. The greatest risk for an architect who wants to build there is, well, architecture: a structure that seems too designed would have looked silly, at best, and insulting at worst. On this count, the studios are very well done indeed: they’re small, rough-hewn buildings, almost as simple as their neighbors but with forms and touches that keep them from seeming pious or perfunctory. The two-story Tower Studio, a vertical building at the end of a narrow boardwalk, has twists in it that makes it refractory, like a jewel made out of wood; the Bridge Studio looks like someone broke off a piece of a SoHo loft and fixed it on a hillside; and the Squish Studio, which sits on a rocky promontory, has a view so dominated by water that it feels like a wheelhouse.

The Inn is the largest of Saunders’s projects, and perhaps most difficult to get right. When it’s done, it will contain more than 40,000 square feet of floor space, spread over four stories — considerably larger than any other building on the island. There’ll be 29 rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, nested on top of various public spaces, all gathered in a subtly X-shaped building that sits on a promontory outside of Joe Batt’s Arm. So far, it’s cost $20 million — probably as much as it would cost to buy every other building on the island — and when it’s done it will belong to Shorefast. Whether it will dwarf the community or crown it is hard to say; Cobb herself makes nervous jokes about its size, but it’s bound to be a spectacular place to stay.

The Inn will bring the tourists, and most of the money, but according to Cobb, art is the key to Fogo’s reinvention, not because it comes with cash, but because it comes with consciousness, with communal self-knowledge and a sense of possibility. Accordingly, the studios are scattered around the island; the idea is not for artists to mix with each other, but to place them in the towns and see what happens. With little feel for art herself, Cobb hired Elisabet Gunnarsdottir, an Icelandic woman with a background in design and arts administration, to set up a semi-autonomous organization called the Fogo Island Arts Corporation. “This place was dying, really,” Gunnarsdottir told me. “But one of the things I love about this project is that this is not us coming in as saviors: ‘Here we are, we know it all, listen to us.’ We have to create something new, modern, for the future. But how do we do it so that there’s a continuation, there’s a link with the past?”

If you ask the islanders what, in fact, they want and expect, you get a host of contradictory answers. Like Newfoundlanders in general, they’re at once proud, somewhat inward and unusually welcoming of visitors.