Brookdale/Renwick House

Place Description

The historic place is the 2.5-storey wood shingle-siding Brookdale (also known as the Renwick House), built at some time between 1904 and 1911 in the classic Foursquare style and relocated to 3430 Benvoulin Road in Kelowna's Benvoulin neighbourhood.

Heritage Value

This large and attractive building has historic value for its association with the tobacco-growing and dairy industries, because its architecture embodies the confidence of the development boom in the era before the First World War, and also because it marks the site and preserves a few timbers of the Lequime family's pioneer store.

This house was built by Martin Renwick on a site along KLO Road. The date of building has been reported as 1904, but it was probably slightly later, since another source says that the Renwick family came from Manitoba only in 1906. The house is said to have had the first flush toilet in Kelowna. Renwick sold the house and moved into Kelowna in 1912, building a large pseudo-sandstone house at 987 Glenn Avenue (now Lawrence Avenue), where his daughter, for many years a local schoolteacher, lived until 1983.

In 1912 the house became caught up in the tobacco bubble created by the British North American Tobacco Company (BNATCO), which drew many local farmers into a whirlwind with its promises of a huge and lucrative tobacco industry. As well as building a large cigar factory at 1250-1298 Ellis Street, the company leased and purchased considerable farmland in the Benvoulin area and built considerable infrastructure, including a number of tobacco-curing barns, one of which is the survivor at 3139 Benvoulin Road.

BNATCO moved this house from its original location on KLO Road to its current site. The site had been the location of the Lequime family's general store, which operated from the 1860s until 1906, when it closed and the stock of goods was moved to the Lequime store in downtown Kelowna (229-233 Bernard Avenue). The old building burned in 1912, and BNATCO moved the Renwick house to its site. A source reported that 'beams from Lequime's buildings, showing evidence of fire scorching, were used as supports for the present home.' Major alterations were done to the house at the time.

After BNATCO went spectacularly bankrupt in 1914, as a result of bad business decisions and embezzlement by a company officer, the house and property were repurchased by Renwick in 1916. Two years later Renwick sold it to William Gifford Chamberlain. Chamberlain had come from England to settle in Dauphin, Manitoba, in 1885, and then, following a familiar pattern, he moved to the Kelowna area in 1918 and bought this property. He actively pursued tobacco-growing during its revival in the 1920s, was considered one of the expert tobacco-growers in the district, and was president of the B.C. Tobacco Growers Association in the late 1920s. After tobacco-growing again ceased during the Great Depression, the tobacco barns on the property were converted to dairy barns. The house was sold by Chamberlain's son Fred in 1952, and has had several owners since. It was reportedly at one point a girls' school. By 1983 it had been named 'Brookdale'.

Character Defining Elements

- Foursquare style, characterized by nearly square plan, medium-pitched hipped roof, deep eaves and three bays on the elevation.
- Gabled dormer window
- Second floor projects slightly, with wall flaring at the division between floors
- Projecting front porch with gabled roof
- Wood windows, double-hung one-over-one sash
- Shingled walls
- Well-landscape large property