It was in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, when Pacific National Exhibition organizers came up with an idea for a lottery that would not only generate excitement about the annual fair, but also showcase the best B.C. had to offer when it came to building products, design and ingenuity.
Once complete, the prize included a fully furnished home that came with a free city lot and $500 in furnishings from Eaton’s Department Store. Dubbed the “Dream Bungalow,” the home, estimated at a total value of $5,000, was pulled to a lot on Renfrew Street by a team of Clydesdale horses. The prize marked the launch of the first home lottery in North America.
That first prize home was a crowd pleaser, and fair-goers flocked to the PNE to buy tickets and fantasize about life in the Dream Bungalow, which is still the case more than eight decades later.
PNE president Mike McDaniel believes the 2015 version of the PNE Prize Home will be one of the most popular in recent years. The spectacular 3,080 square-foot contemporary home was inspired by the views from the lake view lot in beautiful Naramata in the Okanagan Valley where it will be relocated after the Fair at the PNE.
“This home is unlike anything we’ve done before and we anticipate it will be extremely popular with our guests,” says McDaniel. “The Prize Home is a very important part of our annual fair and its history, and to be able to offer such an incredibly beautiful home as part of the Prize Home Lottery is very exciting.”
The PNE selected Okanagan-based Karoleena, an award-winning modular homebuilder, to design and build the modern and technologically advanced 2015 Prize Home.
The home features three bedrooms, expansive windows, top-of-the-line finishes, home automation and a living green roof. A far cry from its 1934 predecessor, the 2015 Grand Prize Home Package is valued at more than $2.1 million.
And while the value of the two homes might be worlds apart, PNE organizers hope this year’s lucky winner will find as much happiness in it as Leonard Frewin, whose name was drawn for that first prize home.
Frewin was a mechanic from Vancouver courting a young Emily Leitch at the time of that summer fair. Leitch’s father insisted Frewin couldn’t properly provide for his daughter, so he did not support the match. As fate would have it, Leonard attended the 1934 PNE on the last day of the fair, where he purchased a Dream Home ticket for 25 cents. After hearing his name announced as the winner on the radio that night, he went to Emily’s house, sat on the stoop until she emerged in the morning to go to work and proposed on the spot. The Frewin family lived in the original 800-square-foot Dream Home for more than 60 years until both Emily and Leonard passed away within months of each other in the 1990s and their children sold the home.
The Fair at the PNE runs Aug. 22 to Sept. 7. For a complete schedule of events, visit PNE.ca.
