Victoria, British Columbia
780 Blanshard Street Hotel
Reliance Properties has stripped a condo tower from its plans and is now asking Victoria to approve a heritage-alteration permit for a standalone 126-room hotel inside the city's 1949 art-deco B.C. Power Commission building.
Announced · TBC
Victoria developer Reliance Properties wants to convert the 1949 art-deco B.C. Power Commission building into the site's first-ever hotel — a scaled-back, tower-free, 126-room scheme now working through a revised heritage-alteration permit application filed with the city in June 2026. No brand, no construction date, and no council approval yet, but genuine permit review is underway.
The essentials
- Group
- Reliance Properties (developer/owner since 2019); no hotel brand or operator named
- Opening
- TBC
- Rooms & suites
- 126 rooms (per the June 2026 revised proposal; some local coverage cites 124 rooms), plus a public café and rooftop restaurant/terrace/gym in a new single-storey rooftop addition
- Segment
- Unconfirmed — no brand or positioning has been announced
- Designer
- OMB Architects + Designers (architect of record for the heritage conversion)
- Entry rate
- NC
The place
The site sits on a sloping triangular downtown Victoria block bounded by Blanshard Street, Fairfield Road and Burdett Avenue, a short walk from the Inner Harbour, the B.C. Legislature and the main downtown core — a workaday office/institutional pocket today, but one with direct pedestrian access to Victoria's established visitor circuit.
The concept
Built in 1949 in art-deco style — originally intended for use as a hospital before instead becoming the headquarters of the B.C. Power Commission from 1950 — the four-storey cast-concrete building has never operated as a hotel. Reliance Properties bought it in 2019 and has cycled through several redevelopment concepts: a 2022-2023 version paired a 69-room hotel with a 16- to 20-storey, roughly 98-unit condominium tower rising above the heritage base. That tower was dropped — Reliance cited a saturated Victoria condo market and the site's lack of on-site parking — leaving a scaled-back, hotel-only scheme: a five-storey restoration with a single-storey rooftop addition (guest terraces, a restaurant and a gym) and about 126 rooms, no residential component. The current heritage-alteration permit application, first submitted in November 2025, was revised and resubmitted to the city on June 3, 2026 to address staff comments on right-of-ways, civil engineering, sidewalks and landscaping; as of mid-August 2026 it remains under active city review, with no council decision reported. Reliance has separately applied for full heritage designation of the building, which would make it eligible for heritage restoration grants and a 10-year municipal property-tax holiday. The building currently houses an artist studio/gallery community of roughly 80 artists across several arts organizations, whose displacement has become a local point of debate alongside the hotel proposal.
Dining & wellness
Nothing confirmed. The plans reference a public café at ground level and a restaurant plus guest terraces in the new rooftop addition, but no chef, operator or restaurant concept has been named.
