Dalnavert Museum, Winnipeg, Guia do visitante e o que fazer por perto

Dalnavert Museum is a restored Victorian house at 61 Carlton Street in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba. It was built in the 1890s as the home of Hugh John Macdonald, son of Canada's first Prime Minister, and it shows how a well-off Winnipeg family lived at the turn of the twentieth century.

The story behind it

Dalnavert went up in 1895 in the Queen Anne Revival style, a fashionable choice for prosperous families in growing prairie cities. Its owner, Hugh John Macdonald, was the surviving son of Sir John A. Macdonald. He practised law in Winnipeg, went into politics and served briefly as premier of Manitoba around 1900. The house is named after the Macdonald family's roots in Scotland.

The neighbourhood around it was one of the most desirable in the young city, lined with large homes for lawyers, merchants and politicians. Today Dalnavert is a rare survivor of that era in the middle of a modern downtown, which is why it has been kept up as a museum.

What to look for

• Study the front of the house for the busy detail typical of Queen Anne Revival design, with its varied rooflines, porch and decorative woodwork.
• Notice how the house sits among much later buildings, a reminder of how different this street looked in the 1890s.
• Look at the scale of the grounds and the entrance, which were meant to announce the standing of the family inside.
• If you go in, pay attention to the period furnishings and room layouts, which show the gap between family life upstairs and the work of running a large household.

Tips for your visit

• Allow 15 to 20 minutes to see the outside and read the setting, or longer if you take an interior visit.
• Check current opening hours and whether tours are running before you plan to go inside.
• Daylight is best for photographs, when the details of the facade show clearly.
• It sits in the downtown core, so you can easily combine it with other historic sites on foot.

See it on a quest

Dalnavert is one stop on Historic Winnipeg: Secret Societies, a self-guided walk through the city's past. You arrive on foot as part of a longer route, the app tells you about the house as you reach it, and you solve a puzzle based on what is in front of you. It is a paid quest, and one ticket covers the whole group, so you can start whenever you like with no guide to wait for.