Historic hotel gets birthday facelift
By Kat Topinka
Some $12 million worth of renovations later, the Lord Elgin Hotel is ready for Canada’s 150th birthday.
The downtown landmark recently celebrated its own milestone 75th anniversary, but with the interior’s newly revamped rooms and updated Wi-Fi, you wouldn’t guess that the Lord Elgin has been a constant presence in Ottawa’s core for so long.
The hotel’s transformation began last year with the installation of a centralized air-conditioning system, said David Smythe, the hotel’s general manager.
“It was time for us to update the look to make it in keeping with the expectations of today’s travellers,” said Smythe.
“We have new corridors, new guestroom doors with swipe locks, and new bathrooms that were taken down to just studs. They’re just gorgeous — Italian marble, walk-in showers with glass doors, and big beautiful backlit mirrors.”
There are unique challenges in rejuvenating a historic building like the Lord Elgin.
The emphasis during the renovation was as much on preserving the old as it was on creating the new, said Smythe, who stumbled upon local designer Susan Firestone after several disappointing encounters with Montreal-based companies.
“Before we even got to the point where we had to start communicating our vision, she understood it,” said Smythe, adding he was thrilled with Firestone’s shared desire to balance the creation of a fresh, modern look with the history of the building’s Art Deco feel and 75-year-old architecture.
“I’m sitting there going, ‘Oh my goodness, someone understands!’ ” he said.
Aside from the addition of two bookending towers in 2004, the hotel’s iconic limestone exterior has remained relatively unchanged since it was created as part of war-time prime minister Mackenzie King’s vision of a cosmopolitan capital city in 1941.
“That’s part of the charm of the place – it still looks like the hotel that was built 75 years ago,” said journalist Randy Boswell, who prepared a commissioned history of the property and is also a Carleton University professor and publisher of Centretown News. “Even that significant expansion when they built the two end towers was very carefully undertaken to preserve the heritage character of the structure.”
What a country chooses to conserve says a lot about what it values, said Susan Ross, a professor of heritage and conservation at Carleton University. She added the engagement citizens have with a piece of history is what allows them to form deep attachments to it.
“With the (150th anniversary) celebration of Confederation, people are looking to think about what has happened that matters, what we want to safeguard, what we want to be able to tell stories about, and what physical, tangible elements represent the places where stories happened,” said Ross. “While the Lord Elgin is a war story, it also has a commercial aspect to it that’s important for understanding how cities grow, and understanding the tensions between the private and government players in the city.”
Boswell said that after a year spent reflecting on the history of the Lord Elgin, it seems like a natural time to think about what the next 75 years holds for the hotel. With Canada’s sesquicentennial around the corner, 2017 could be a very busy and historic year indeed for one of the city’s prominent landmarks.