Casa Loma

Where it sits. Casa Loma stands at 1 Austin Terrace in midtown Toronto, on the brow of the Davenport escarpment — the old shoreline of glacial Lake Iroquois, which is why the ground drops away so abruptly to the south and why the house has a clear view over the downtown towers three kilometres away. Spadina Road climbs to it from the Dupont subway station below; the Baldwin Steps, a long public staircase, run up the escarpment beside the property. Spadina House, an earlier and far more restrained estate, sits immediately next door and is the better building if you care about how people actually lived.

The man who built it. Sir Henry Mill Pellatt made his fortune twice: once broking stock, and once by securing the Toronto Electric Light Company's monopoly on street lighting and then financing the transmission of Niagara hydro power to the city. Knighted in 1905, colonel of the Queen's Own Rifles, he commissioned E. J. Lennox — architect of Toronto's Old City Hall and the King Edward Hotel — to build him a castle. Construction ran from 1911 to 1914 and cost roughly $3.5 million, an extraordinary sum then. The result has 98 rooms, a Great Hall with a ceiling almost 20 metres high, an oak room said to have taken three years to carve, a conservatory with a stained-glass dome and marble floor, two towers in deliberately different styles — one Scottish, one Norman — and a set of amenities that were never finished, including a swimming pool and a bowling alley left as bare concrete.

And how he lost it. Pellatt's timing was catastrophic. Ontario's public power authority undercut his electrical monopoly, his wartime and postwar investments soured, and the annual property tax on the castle climbed from a few hundred dollars to five figures. He auctioned the contents in 1924 and moved out after less than a decade in residence. The City of Toronto seized the building for unpaid taxes in 1933, and from 1937 the Kiwanis Club of West Toronto ran it as a tourist attraction, which is the only reason it was not demolished. A hospitality company has operated it under city lease since 2014. During the Second World War the stables were quietly used for research and assembly work on submarine detection equipment for the Royal Navy — a genuine secret in a building that is otherwise the least discreet structure in Ontario.

What you actually see. The tour covers the Great Hall, library, conservatory, Pellatt's suite, the servants' floor, and both towers, whose spiral stairs deliver the view that most visitors came for. The best part is underground and outdoors: an 800-foot tunnel runs beneath Austin Terrace from the house to the stables and carriage room, where the horse stalls are finished in mahogany and Spanish tile with the animals' names in gold leaf. Five acres of terraced gardens on the south side open from spring to autumn, with fountains, a rose collection and the escarpment view. Exhibits on the Queen's Own Rifles and on the wartime sonar work occupy parts of the lower levels, and an escape-room operator and a restaurant now use other rooms.

On screen. Casa Loma is one of the busiest filming locations in Canada, for a simple reason: it looks like a European castle, a boarding school, a private institution or a supervillain's house, and it is twenty minutes from a full production ecosystem. Its most quoted credit is X-Men (2000), where the interiors served as Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, a role it reprised for X2 (2003) — the mansion that millions of viewers associate with Westchester County, New York, is a Toronto tax casualty. Chicago (2002) also shot here during its Toronto production. Beyond features, the house turns up constantly in television, music video and commercial work, and the estate keeps a dedicated film office. Visitors hoping to recognise specific X-Men rooms should know that much of the school's layout was studio-built; what Casa Loma supplied was the entrance hall, the corridors and the exterior mass.

Getting there and timing. Dupont station on Line 1 is the closest subway stop, followed by a steep five-minute climb up Spadina Road or the Baldwin Steps. Paid parking is limited and awkward. The house is open daily year-round with timed admission at peak periods; school groups dominate weekday mornings in spring and autumn, and summer weekends are heavy. The building is a hard place for limited mobility — towers and servants' stairs are unavoidable if you want the full route, though an elevator reaches the main floors. December brings a heavily decorated interior and long lines; February and early November are the quietest weeks in the calendar.