Glen Brae, Shaughnessy Heights, Vancouver, 1) 1911, 2) 1925, 3) 1925, and 4) today

Built for retired lumberman William Lamont Tait and his wife; construction began on Glen Brae in 1910, the house being completed in 1911. The home housed one of the first elevators in British Columbia, installed for Mrs. Tait, who had lost her leg. It boasted a $10,000 (adjusted for inflation, $218,305) wrought-iron fence with golf leaf rosettes, imported from Scotland, six bathrooms and a ballroom spanning an entire floor.

In 1919 Tait passed away and the next year his wife followed. In 1925 it became the Canadian headquarters of the Kanadian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The house was known at the time as the Imperial Palace, with membership reaching a height of 8000. Due to local ordinances, including one disallowing masks, it lasted only about a year in that incarnation. It probably didn’t help that local members were also involved in the six week long kidnapping and torture of a Chinese houseboy during a fit of vigilante justice.

Later that decade, in 1929, it became a kindergarten. In the 1930′s the twin domes gave the home it’s cheeky nickname, the Mae West house. By the 1980′s it was a home for the elderly. When Elisabeth Wlosinski, the owner of the elderly home, passed away in 1991, she willed the home to city, asking that it be used for the community’s benefit, and today the house is a children’s home called Canuck Place.