Casa Loma is what happens when a man dreams in Edwardian excess and refuses to let practicality get in the way.
Perched atop the Davenport escarpment, its turrets and chimneys rising above the city like something airlifted from the Scottish Highlands, Casa Loma does not feel like it belongs in Toronto. And perhaps that’s the point. It was never meant to fit in—it was meant to rise above.
The man behind the dream was Sir Henry Pellatt, a knighted Canadian financier, military man, and egomaniac of the most romantic kind. Pellatt made his fortune bringing hydroelectric power to Toronto, a city just beginning to modernize. He saw electricity not just as a utility, but as a revolution—and he intended to build a home worthy of a man who could command lightning.
Construction began in 1911. Pellatt hired architect E.J. Lennox, best known for designing Old City Hall, and gave him a simple brief: Think big. The result was a castle with 98 rooms, an elevator, a central vacuum system, secret passageways, and a bathtub large enough to confuse the average swimmer. The stables alone—equipped with mahogany stalls and Spanish tile—would have made a fine manor on their own.
He called it Casa Loma—Spanish for "House on the Hill"—because of course he did. Pellatt was a man of mythic vision, and Casa Loma was his monument.
But monuments have a way of turning into mausoleums.
Pellatt’s fortune, built on speculative investments and the hope of endless expansion, began to unravel almost as soon as the castle was finished. World War I dried up the economy. His energy empire crumbled under the weight of government nationalization. Within a decade, the castle was too costly to keep. Pellatt and his wife were forced to abandon their dream home and move to a much more modest address—one floor of a former hunting lodge. He died nearly penniless, his grand castle already being eyed by realtors, ghosts, and vandals.
Casa Loma changed hands over the years: briefly a hotel, then a night school, even a spot for secret wartime meetings. Eventually, the City of Toronto took ownership, leasing it out to various operators and opening it as a tourist attraction. Today, it exists in that peculiar state of semi-reverence that Toronto reserves for its most extravagant relics.
Tourists wander its halls. High schoolers attend proms in its great hall. Films and TV shows—X-Men, Chicago, The Umbrella Academy—borrow its dramatic interiors to impersonate other places. It has become a castle of a thousand disguises.
But beneath the glitz and the gift shop, Casa Loma remains a very Toronto kind of fantasy: grand, doomed, eccentric, and strangely enduring. It is both a symbol of ambition and a cautionary tale about the cost of building dreams in stone.
Stand in the tower, look out over the city Pellatt helped electrify, and ask yourself—was it worth it?
He would’ve said yes.
And the turrets still rising above the skyline suggest that, somehow, despite everything, the answer might still be yes.