Legacy of Love

For Valentine’s Day, we are smitten by the way that love has shaped historic places.

Heart shaped stained glass window at 190 Bronson

Our offices, in a beautiful Victorian brick house, came from an act of love.  A manager and owner in the Ottawa lumber industry built the house as a wedding gift for his wife.

The house is a showpiece of woodwork, with extravagant paneling even on the ceilings.  We hope the lumberman lavished the same care and attention on his wife that he did on the house!

Our predecessors at 190 Bronson were not alone in cementing their love in, well, cement.

24 Sussex | Credit: Radio-Canada / Michel Aspirot

24 Sussex, the now dilapidated official residence of the Prime Minister, was constructed in 1866 as a wedding gift – and sold many years later after the wife’s death. With this legacy of faithful devotion as a model, we are hoping that the government will show some love to 24 Sussex again.

Decorative details at Taj Mahal, Agra, India

Stories of heartbreak are built in stone, too, like Boldt Castle in the Thousand Islands, where an anguished young husband stopped in the middle of construction when his beloved died. And perhaps most famously of all, there is the Taj Mahal, a tomb built on the grief of an emperor whose soul mate had died in childbirth.

Ponts Des Arts, Paris

Love can be dangerous – and not only for the heart. In 2015, French authorities removed hundreds of thousands of love locks (locks inscribed with the initials of lovers and fastened forever in a romantic gesture) from the Pont des Arts in Paris.  The weight of all those locks was causing the historic structure to buckle.

Historic places continue to be bonded into the fabric of our lives – places to meet, to spark, to marry, or to grow old with those you love.

Do you have a story of love at a historic place?