If Joseph Merrill Currier returned from the grave to haunt his old house, he’d barely recognize it. The lumber baron and member of Parliament built an ornate, idiosyncratic mansion in 1868 that overlooked the Ottawa River. Over time, its turret was removed, window arches straightened, the front porch shaved off. More recently, its interior has been gutted.
The house at 24 Sussex Dr. – for 75 years, the official residence of prime ministers – has been through a lot.
What comes next? The 34-room, 12,000-square-foot building has stood vacant for a decade, as the federal government has waffled about how to handle the dilapidated structure. In June, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a plan to rebuild the residence through a “design-build competition,” and the Rideau Hall Foundation has set a goal of raising $50-million in private donations toward its restoration.
While the address of 24 Sussex is familiar to most Canadians, the building is not recognizable in the same way as other official residences around the world. It has never contained formal government offices, unlike London’s 10 Downing St.; and unlike the White House in Washington, it was not built to house a head of government. It became the prime minister’s residence almost by accident, and its architecture has been seriously rebuilt twice. With the newly announced renovation, its role and purpose might be clearly defined for the first time.
Peter Coffman, an associate professor of architectural history and theory at Carleton University, argues that the new design for the house should be forward-looking. “It needs to honour the heritage of the building and evoke what we aspire to be,” he said.
At the same time, he said, the designers must consider the building’s whole story.
“The history of a building isn’t a snapshot,” he said. “It’s more like a palimpsest, where subsequent writers come and partially erase what was there and add their own bits. And that’s one of the things that makes places like this so interesting.”
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The house began as a rich man’s wedding present to his wife. Currier, a Vermont-born entrepreneur who made a fortune in the Ottawa lumber trade, built it in 1868 to celebrate his marriage to Hannah Wright. It was designed by his brother, Massachusetts architect James Currier. They dubbed it “Gorffwysfa,” Welsh for “place of rest.”
The Currier mansion was sited for grand views of the Ottawa River, and designed in a picturesque, asymmetrical Victorian fashion. In style, it resembled the nearby Earnscliffe at 140 Sussex Dr. The exterior of rough-cut Gloucester limestone and gingerbread trim framed an interior of dark, drape-lined rooms panelled in oak, walnut and butternut.
A reported 500 guests attended the housewarming reception, among them then-prime minister John A. Macdonald.
In 1870, the family added a ballroom specifically to welcome Prince Arthur, the future Duke of Connaught. The event on Feb. 16 drew Ottawa’s elite.
The house sold in 1902 to W.C. Edwards, another powerful lumber manufacturer, MP and future senator.
Edwards carried out a major renovation, remaking it in an eclectic Edwardian style. The rebuilt house featured a round tower, a porte-cochére and an ornate protruding bay window. (Heritage architect Scott Weir calls it “a perhaps slightly messy but enthusiastic eclectic architecture that responded to its setting,” and notes its similarity to the contemporary Château Laurier.)
In the 1920s, the house passed to W.C. Edwards’s nephew, Gordon Edwards, who later became an MP.
Earnscliffe, the grand house at 140 Sussex Dr., became the residence of the British High Commissioner, marking Sussex Drive’s shift toward a new identity as a zone of embassies and diplomatic residences.
During the Second World War, the federal government took an interest in the site. In July, 1943, Gordon Edwards and his family were notified that the house was being expropriated. Mr. Edwards fought the expropriation and what he saw as a low price of $125,000. Three years later, the case was decided (with an award of $140,000, plus costs), and Mr. Edwards was allowed to remain in the residence until his death later that year.
But it was not clear exactly what the government intended to do with the house. In public, officials were vague; in private, then-deputy minister of public works Emmett Murphy floated a variety of ideas, including using it as an office for British military officials – or as a residence for the prime minister.
The building sat empty and crumbling for a few years; the Australian embassy moved in for a brief period, before the government made up its mind.
In late 1949, the Department of Public Works hired Toronto architecture firm Allward & Gouinlock for a major renovation and expansion. They gave the house, for the second time, a rebuild that established a new architectural language: this time, a flat-fronted fusion of château style and Georgian revival. The turret, the front porch and the bay window above the front door disappeared. Windows were joined together and arches simplified.
In her 1982 book, Residences: Homes of Canada’s Leaders, Maureen McTeer, the wife of former prime minister Joe Clark, explained the changes like so: “Everything modern was in vogue. What we now preserve religiously as heritage homes were then considered old monstrosities. The best thing an architect could prescribe for old buildings was demolition or complete remodelling … ‘straightening’ bay windows or building a wall where a window had been before.”
In the 1950s, establishment architects such as Allward & Gouinlock belatedly engaged with European and American Modernism. Rather than abandon the building traditions of the past, they put a modern twist on them. Allward & Gouinlock’s East and West Memorial Buildings in Ottawa, for instance, skillfully blended classicist and modernist vocabularies. This was architecture as compromise, for a country built on compromise.
Louis St. Laurent became the first prime minister to move into 24 Sussex. (St. Laurent was reluctant to take on the pomp of an official residence and initially insisted on paying rent.)
Through the ensuing decades, the house played a largely private role as the residence for prime ministers and their families. Ms. McTeer’s book – one of very few published texts on the house’s history – presents photographs of the Diefenbakers in the garden, Pierre Trudeau playing with his kids in the yard, U.S. first lady Pat Nixon bouncing a baby on her knee.
The house’s interior changed only incrementally through the late 20th century, as each successive family altered the decor and layout to suit their needs. (Pierre Trudeau added an indoor swimming pool in 1975, the only major addition.)
From the 1990s onward, it began to show clear signs of decay; government reports noted aging mechanical systems and crumbling finishes.
An intruder, André Dallaire, broke into the house late one November night. He wandered through the building for at least 30 minutes before reaching the bedroom of then-prime minister Jean Chrétien. He was confronted by Mr. Chrétien’s wife, Aline, who called for help from RCMP officers. No one was hurt, but the incident revealed serious weaknesses in security and prompted changes to the perimeter.
When Stephen Harper left office in 2015, his successor, Justin Trudeau, declined to move in. The house began a decade-long period of vacancy as Mr. Trudeau moved, instead, into Rideau Cottage on the grounds of the governor-general’s residence.
In 2023, the National Capital Commission stripped the house of its furnishings and finishes, leaving it a shell.
The house’s history is one of steady, incremental change – punctuated by two major alterations. This might suggest that the building has lesser heritage value. Prof. Coffman strongly resists that argument, however.
“I get why people might think that, but it does put the whole concept of a heritage building into an awfully tight straitjacket,” he said. “If you say it’s only a heritage building if it looks the way it looked when it was first built, then nothing’s going to be a heritage building.”
Instead, he suggests that the decades of prime ministerial occupation, from St. Laurent to Harper, are integral parts of its history.
If it remains the official residence, its rebuilding could send a message about sustainability.
“We have to figure out a way of retrofitting the vast inventory of buildings we already have,” Prof. Coffman said. “And in terms of symbolic importance, could there be a better symbolic meaning for 24 Sussex than to have it as the sort of model old building, retrofit with sustainable features?”
That is an agenda that a 19th-century lumberman like Mr. Currier might not understand, but societies change, and buildings do too.
