Brentwood Hotel, Brentwood Bay
The Brentwood Hotel opened in Brentwood Bay in May 1914. The building was designed by architect Samuel Maclure, who also designed many of the buildings at the Butchart Gardens.
The original Brentwood Hotel designed by Samuel Maclure is no longer standing (another hotel now stands on the site) but it is very useful in dating when the Butchart Gardens first came to be recognized as a major tourist attraction.
The Brentwood Hotel was about one kilometer from Benvenuto, the Butchart estate at Tod Inlet, but the early promotional advertisements for the Saanich Inlet and Brentwood Bay circa 1914-1918 make no mention of the Butchart Gardens as a tourism destination; in fact they don’t mention the Butchart gardens at all. Instead, they describe the Brentwood Hotel as the leading tourism attraction in the Brentwood Bay area.
This omission, along with the fact that the first newspaper story about the Butchart Gardens, published in 1917 in the Vancouver Daily World, suggest that the Butchart Gardens did not become a major tourist attraction until about 1918.
Here is an advertisement for the opening of the Brentwood Hotel in May 1914:
Here are advertisements for the Brentwood Hotel from July 1921:
The Brentwood Bay Resort now stands on the former site of the Brentwood Hotel. The map below shows the location of the site in relation to the Butchart Gardens:
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