Tamura House
Hotel:

The Tamura House Hotel was built between 1912-1914.  The owner was Shinkichi Tamura, a Japanese merchant who served as Canada’s 1st Commissioner of Trade to Japan.  The Tamura building has unique sheet metal ornamentation cornices, corbels and Corinthian pilasters designed to reflect the community’s integration into the North American culture.  The hotel was considered the ‘Heart of Little Tokyo’ and was a substantial rooming house for the area while the storefronts were bustling with a variety of Canadian-Japanese businesses such as a dentist, drugstore, salmon packing outfit and Tamura’s own Canada and Japan Trust Savings Bank to name a few.  The Tamura Hotel is now a provincially owner single room occupancy (SRO) which was restored and renovated in 2016.  Vintage Woodworks played a key role in that restoration project by providing all new storefronts to match the original, upgrading the windows throughout by restoring the jambs and adding thermal sash and the recreation of rooftop parapets to match the originals as well.  The project won several awards for Heritage Conservation.