Description of Historic Place

Marlborough Apartments National Historic Site is a four-storey, red brick, Queen Anne Revival-style apartment building located at 570 Milton Street, Montréal. Official recognition covers the legal property at the time of designation (1990).

Heritage Value

Marlborough Apartments was designated a national historic site in 1991 as a fine example of the Queen Anne Revival style and turn-of-the-century apartment design.

The heritage value of this site resides in its illustration of the Queen Anne Revival style as used for apartment building design at the turn of the twentieth century in Canada.

The Marlborough Apartments was designed by Taylor and Gordon, architects, and built in 1900. Queen Anne Revival was a popular motif for luxurious domestic architecture (both houses and apartments) across Canada in the 1870-1914 period. The key to successful Queen Anne Revival apartment design is conception of the building as a unified whole, much like a large house. Marlborough Apartments is one of the few Queen Anne apartment buildings that has survived in Canada.

Source: HSMBC Minute, November 1990

Character-Defining Elements

Elements which characterize the heritage value of this building include:
- The compact and slightly assymmetrical, rectangular massing of the building organized vertically in 3 irregular bays, each with a distinctive roofline;
- the footprint of the building with its U-shaped interior courtyard;
- the allusion to classical proportions in the design (3 vertical bays, regular fenstration disposition but not size, matching end bays which use 2nd and 3rd storey bay windows on the building edge to create the allusion of pillars, the focus on a prominent central arched door set in a well-sculpted enclosure beneath a shaped pediment);
- the Dutch influence in the selection of ornamentation (shaped gables and pediment; centrepiece details of the main entrance);
- the rich contrasts in material colours and textures (stone foundation, smooth sculpted stone entrance, textured red brick, smooth wood on projecting bays, use of ornamental iron balcony rails);
- its setting in a treed, residential area.