Craigdarroch Castle
A Scottish baronial mansion of 1890 built for a coal magnate, restored as an 1890s house museum.
Craigdarroch Castle was built between 1887 and 1890 for Robert Dunsmuir, a Scottish emigrant who made a fortune from Vancouver Island coal. He died before it was finished and his widow Joan lived there until 1908. The house has four storeys and some 39 rooms beneath a tower and steep roofs, in the Scottish baronial manner then fashionable for North American industrialists. The design was begun by the Portland architect Warren Heywood Williams and completed after his death by his partner Arthur L. Smith.
After the family left, the building served in turn as a military hospital, a college, a school board office and the Victoria Conservatory of Music, and the interiors suffered accordingly. A charitable society has run it as a museum since 1979 and has carried out a long restoration. Visitors climb 87 stairs from the entrance hall to the tower, passing panelled rooms furnished to the 1890s, one of the largest collections of residential stained glass in Canada, and intricate woodwork in oak, cedar and mahogany.
Highlights
- Some 39 rooms across four storeys plus a tower
- Extensive Victorian residential stained glass
- Panelled interiors furnished to the 1890s
- 87 stairs up to the tower and its view over Victoria
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