Castles of "Canada" CHÂTEAU LAURIER vs CHÂTEAU DE RAMEZAY

The Fairmont Château Laurier is a 660,000-square-foot (61,000 m2) hotel with 429 guest rooms in the city's downtown core of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, located near the intersection of Rideau Street and Sussex Drive and designed in a French Gothic Revival Châteauesque style to complement the adjacent Parliament buildings. The hotel is above the Colonel By Valley, home of the Ottawa Locks of the Rideau Canal, and overlooks the Ottawa River. The main dining room (now the Laurier Room) overlooks Major's Hill Park. The reception rooms include the Wedgewood-blue Adam Room; the Laurier Room defined by Roman columns; the Empire-style ballroom and the Drawing Room featuring cream and gold plaster ornament. The hotel was designated a national historic site in 1980. Grand Trunk Railway president Charles Melville Hays commissioned Château Laurier, and construction occurred between 1909 and 1912 for CA$2 million, in tandem with Ottawa's downtown Union Station (now the Senate of Canada Building) across Rideau Street. The two buildings were connected with a tunnel. When the hotel opened, private rooms cost $2 a night; 155 of the 350 bedrooms featured a private bath while the other 104 rooms had washstands with hot and cold water connections. In addition dormitories and common bathrooms were available as were rooms for travelling salesmen with sample tables to display goods. The hotel features original Tiffany stained-glass windows and hand-moulded plaster decorations dating back to 1912. The walls were faced with Indiana limestone and feature conical turrets, dormer windows topped by a copper roof. The gables are carved with flowers, scrolls and crests. The lobby floors were constructed of Belgian marble.

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The Château Ramezay is a museum and historic building on Notre-Dame Street in Old Montreal, opposite Montreal City Hall in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Built in 1705 as the residence of then-governor of Montreal, Claude de Ramezay, the Château was the first building proclaimed as a historical monument in Quebec and is the province's oldest private history museum. It was designated a National Historic Sites of Canada in 1949. Over the years, the Château changed owners and functions several times, with Ramezay's descendants selling the manor to the fur-trading Compagnie des Indes. From 1775, it became the Canadian headquarters for the Continental Army when it seized Montreal. Benjamin Franklin stayed there overnight in 1776, while trying to raise troops to fight for the Americans in the American Revolutionary War.

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