Allan Memorial Institute - Hugh Allan House "Ravenscrag"

Hugh Allan House "Ravenscrag"

Ravenscrag was completed in 1863 for Sir Hugh Allan - at his death the wealthiest man in Canada. In 1860, Allan purchased fourteen acres that had belonged to the estate of Simon McTavish for $10,000, perched on the side of Mount Royal at the top of what is now McTavish Street. He knocked down the old McTavish manor and then employed the Liverpool-born architects, Victor Roy and John W. Hopkins, to both design and build him a new home. Three years later, Hopkins and Roy had completed the Allan's Italianate home, which continues to dominate the remains of the Golden Square Mile. The property that housed him and his wife, thirteen children and eleven servants excelled "in size and cost any dwelling-house in Canada".

As Allan intended, Ravenscrag was both imposing and intimidating, with a three-hundred foot frontage and a gate guarded by a Gate Lodge on Pine Avenue. Before his son extended the east wing of the house in 1889, there were thirty-four rooms inside. The dining room was in a sedate Georgian-Italian style, whereas the ballroom with its wrought-iron Minstrels' gallery was in the French style. Allan's favourite room was the Victorian ground-floor library with dark panelling and heavy furniture. This room is the only one in the house which still remains more or less how it was in Allan's day. From the seventy-foot tower rising over the house, Allan was occasionally glimpsed with a brass telescope in hand scanning Longue-Pointe for the safe arrival of the weekly Allan Line Steamer coming in from Glasgow

Sir Hugh Allan died in 1882, and Ravenscrag was inherited by his eldest son, Sir Montagu Allan. In 1889, he employed Andrew Taylor to extend the east wing, and he almost doubled the number of servants his father had kept to a fulltime staff of nineteen. Taylor also enlarged the stables for Sir Montagu in 1898.

In 1942, after the premature death of Martha Allan, the last remaining child of Sir Montagu and Lady Allan, they donated Ravenscrag to the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1942. Afterwards its lavish interior was entirely gutted and replaced.