From Tudor ruin to maximalist masterpiece: The $20M Rosemead House makeover

When Vancouver developer Lenny Moy purchased a rundown Tudor-style inn near Victoria, he thought he’d stumbled upon a charming fixer-upper: a neglected 107-year-old Samuel Maclure mansion, with good bones and a bit of history.

He figured a tidy $1 million would fix it up. That was ten years and $20 million ago.

Today, the result is something else entirely—part luxury boutique hotel, part fever dream of the British aristocracy, and part personal museum of an antiquing hobby that turned into an obsession.

There are more than 2,500 antiques at the new Rosemead House in Esquimalt, all sourced from the U.K., including a reproduction of the gates at Buckingham Palace purchased from Netflix’s The Crown, bedroom fixtures that feel like royal heirlooms, fine china from the Savoy Hotel, and a Rembrandt (sort of).

“At first I thought ok I’ll just buy a couple of pieces of antiques, because a little accent piece here and there would be great,” says Moy. “Then I said, if I don’t go big I can’t do this properly. So I decided: okay I’m just going to go big.”

The 67-year-old founder of Aragon Properties exudes a kind of youthful energy, with his tousled hair and Converse Chuck Taylor shoes. He admits he’s never run a hotel or a restaurant and didn’t particularly care for antiques before this all began. But he now finds himself elbows-deep in curated maximalism, cataloguing centuries-old walnut desks and designing wine cellars around weeping granite walls.

“I don’t think there’s anything else like it in Canada,” says Moy.

He may well be right. After all, how often does a veteran real estate developer throw caution to the wind and reinvent an old English inn as if money was no object? Going big doesn’t quite do it justice.

Not your average condo

All of which is to say, this is an unusual development for Aragon Properties.

Typically, the 30-year-old company that Moy founded focuses on planned communities, mid-level residential projects and mixed-use commercial spaces around the Metro Vancouver suburbs, occasionally venturing into Toronto.

The renovation of the inn is the centrepiece of a larger $200 million real estate development on the 1.7 hectare site, which includes three six-storey condo buildings, six townhomes and 180 residences.

Aragon self-finances without pre-sales, so the company has largely avoided the crash in B.C. real estate’s investor class that forced some projects to stall out or convert to purpose-built rentals mid-stream.

Still, it’s a tricky time to come online. High interest rates, limp rents and government crackdowns have squeezed out much of B.C.’s investor class. Moy delayed the launch six to eight months to wait it out, then polished the project further.

Sales opened July 11. One bedrooms range in the $600,000s for between 610 and 690 square feet, rising to $1.2 million for more spacious two-bedrooms. The three-bedroom penthouse collection tops out at $1.6 million.

Inside the maximalist manor

The beating heart of the development, though, is Rosemead House.

The three-storey stone mansion was built as a businessman’s residence in 1906, then converted to a guesthouse after the Second World War. Over the years, it floundered as a hotel and restaurant, sliding into despair and near-insolvency.

“I’ll say that I thought it was in better shape than it actually was,” says Moy. “That’s the honest answer. Everything that you see has been taken apart and put back together.” That includes large portions of the roof, siding, railings, refurbished stained glass windows and more.

To enter the grounds, you pull up to the towering wrought-iron Buckingham Palace gates, shipped from the UK after an auction of items created for the TV show.

“I thought this would be neat to do,” says Moy. They slowly swing open as he drives inside to a driveway flanked by towering old trees. He stops. It must be hard to impress a wealthy developer with more than 100 projects under his belt. But Moy is grinning and giggling.

“That was an awesome experience,” he says.

Entering the lobby, you are hit by a wave of textures and colours—dark green wood panelling, yellow flowered William Morris wallpaper, red velvet drapery, deep wood framing and rich carpets of floral green and pink. A fire flickers. Modern elements collide, including an enormous LED chandelier of pearl necklace balls hanging more than 10-feet down from the ceiling.

“It’s a feeling of discovery, a mixture of traditional and new,” says Moy. “I didn’t want it to feel old.”

Up the stairs to the landing is “The Crown Library” where the drapery came from the TV show’s reproduction of the Queen’s bedroom, as did two gold-coloured versailles pedestal towers and two pink floral chairs. On the wall is an enormous reproduction of Rembrandt’s ‘Storm on the Sea of Galilee’ that Moy picked up from the Kevin Hart film Lift, shot in the U.K.

The reproductions mix with genuine antiques, including a bird walnut writing desk and a library where if you randomly pull a book from the wall you find it’s a folio of plays by Shakespeare printed in 1883.

Cataloguing a collection fit for royalty

Moy began purchasing antique items while visiting his daughter who was attending university in the U.K. He raided the Savoy and Dorchester hotels, estate sales, antique houses and whatever else he could find, shipping crate upon crate back to Victoria.

It all landed in a warehouse floor of a separate Aragon building in Esquimalt, where designer Karen Wichert photographed, labeled and catalogued the items in a spreadsheet known as the antique bible, which when printed is as thick as the actual book.

“My job has been really trying to organize all the furniture, and reupholster it, and finding the right locations for things,” says Wichert. “So it’s really been quite an interesting puzzle.”

“I’ve done a lot of heritage work,” she adds. “But what makes this one unique, I think, is that we’ve got so many beautiful antiques coming from the UK, and so many beautiful art pieces and mirrors. It’s like a museum itself.”

The only comparison Wichert can make is when she was hired to work on a palace for the Emir of Qatar. “That’s the only similar scale,” she says. There, the furniture budget was $44 million. For Rosemead, Moy will only say he spent “millions” on antiques alone.

In one corner of the warehouse, local artist Miles Lowry is fixing the gold plaster frame around a large mirror frame that someone clipped with their purse and sent it tumbling off the restaurant wall. Moy asked him to fix one piece, says Lowry, but then more just kept arriving. He’s been there a year.

“There was a point here where this was so full of paintings and stuff, I was like: I think he’s lost his mind,” says Lowry. Then he saw the building first-hand. “I’m blown away,” he says, simply.

Meanwhile, Moy meanders through the aisles of sidetables, dressers, fine china, paintings, mirrors and vases he’s purchased. He estimates he’s bought more than 2,500 items. Despite all that, he’s not an expert on antiques, fine art or furniture. He’s never done anything like this in any of Aragon’s 100 other projects.

“I was always very much hands on when it came to designing the outside of our buildings and how it looked,” he says. “Interiors, I always left to our interior design team. “But with this project, I became much more involved in terms of interior design. Because it needed it. It needed that level of detail.”

There are 14 rooms in the old inn, each different. Some have terraces and balconies, slanted roofs, alcoves, hidden nooks and crannies. The inn’s narrow hallways twist and turn like a maze.

Every room has different wallpaper, colouring, furniture and nicknacks from Moy’s antique warehouse. Each also has a $23,000 Duxiana mattress. The clawfoot tubs and ornate bathroom finishings somehow manage to co-exist beside Kohler smart-toilets that open automatically when you enter the room and have 17 different settings on the detachable remote.

There are another 14 hotel units in one of the new buildings, called “The Grove.” They’ve been given similar stylings, wallpaper and antiques to resemble the inn. A spa is expected to open this fall. Rates range from more than $500 to $900 a night.

A tree grows in the restaurant

Off the lobby is a lounge and restaurant called Janevca—the name an amalgam of the names of Moy’s three children, Janelle, Evan and Cailee.

It would be impossible to talk about the restaurant without mentioning the giant tree in its centre, with branches that hit the ceiling and sprawl out over tables, encompassing diners in a lush canopy where recessed lighting streams through the branches. The blossoms on the tree are changed with the seasons, from Japanese maple to cherry blossom to magnolia.

“Through my travels I always saw that greenery in spaces,” says Moy. “That incorporation of a canopy, and the light that shines through it, through the tree, is what makes it special.” The restaurant is a rich collection of dark wood, red bench seating, live-edge tables and stone walls.

“We’re talking a family-style dining approach with fire cooking, but bringing that into an elevated light,” says chef Andrea Alridge, a 35-year-old rising star in the industry who Moy poached from Vancouver where she’d worked at CinCin Ristorante, and Osteria Savio Volpe and competed in Top Chef Canada.

“Especially in such a magnificent and eclectic room, where everywhere you look it’s a sensory overload.”

The open fire cooking is a hallmark of CinCin. Most of Janevca’s items are smoked, cooked in the coals or hit directly by the fire as well, using a mixture of maple, alder, apple wood and cherry.

“I describe it more as its wood-fired Pacific Northwest cuisine at its finest,” says Alridge.

There’s also nods to her Filipino-Jamaican background. The hokkaido scallop crudo lays on a bed of fragrant, green Pyanggang sauce. The Filipino barbecue skewers (you have to ask for them by name) use her grandmother’s recipe. The acquerello risotto, with grilled beef tongue, is designed to emulate a Filipino dish Alridge grew up eating called arozz caldo.

“It’s slowly become a fan favourite,” she says.

Moy said his goal is to have one of the finest restaurants in Victoria. There is Haida Gwaii Halibut served with delicately chewy spiced octopus in a bowl of the most delicious chowder. The pork cheeks make double use of the fire, slowly roasted on coals while the accompanying radishes are smoked. The grilled gem lettuce is also hit with flame, before being smothered in anchovy buttermilk dressing.

For dessert, the peach melba is carefully crafted to look like an actual peach, including with a chocolate pit. A creation of French chef Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy Hotel, it is created here as more of a cake and served on plates from the Savoy that Moy purchased at auction.

Many of the dishes have unique twists, by design.

“It’s something that I’ve been pushing really hard for,” says Alridge. “I know it’s a little different here on the Island, where people are very set with what they want and how they want things, but that’s kind of the whole point of our menu is to push people a bit out of their comfort zone and to still make it approachable enough for them.”

One perk of getting poached by an eccentric millionaire invested in a passion project is that Alridge was able to design what is effectively her dream kitchen.

“For me I take a lot of joy just in seeing people walk through the lobby and seeing the shock and absolute surprise in all of it,” she says. “It’s really cute to see how excited people get.”

Trading minimalism for magic

Moy has no experience running a restaurant. Still, he seems to enjoy wandering from table to table, chatting with patrons about their meals.

The veteran developer admits he’s in love with what he’s created at Rosemead. He’s like a man who walked into a British estate sale and never quite walked back out.

The result has been a flip in style for Moy and Aragon—for this one project, at least. “In Vancouver, almost every designer is minimalist. West coast modern,” he says. “Whereas the British have a design concept called maximalist. Some people call it clutter. But they always have many layers of color, and many different things. They call it trinkets. You want to call it whatever you want… that’s what makes it interesting.”

Interesting is not a word that quite does Rosemead justice. Audacious, perhaps. Unique, definitely.

Rosemead isn’t just a hotel, it’s a love letter to an aesthetic Moy never knew he had, written in 19th-century wallpaper, vintage books, and the flicker of firelight. You don’t build a place like this to flip it. You build it because, somewhere along the way, on a journey that bordered on obsession, for Moy it started to feel like home.