The Fairmont Château Laurier is a 660,000-square-foot (61,000 m2) hotel with 429 guest rooms in the downtown core of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, located near the intersection of Rideau Street and Sussex Drive and designed in a French Gothic Revival Châteauesque style to complement the adjacent Parliament buildings.

[2] Grand Trunk Railway president Charles Melville Hays commissioned Château Laurier, and construction occurred between 1909 and 1912 for CA$2 million, in tandem with Ottawa's downtown Union Station (now the Senate of Canada Building) across Rideau Street.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, then the Prime Minister of Canada, helped secure the important site for the construction, and the hotel was eventually named in his honour.

However, Hays, who was en route to Canada for the hotel opening, tragically perished aboard the RMS Titanic when it sank on 15 April.

[2] In August 1914, Major Raymond Brutinel enrolled the first recruits for the Canadian Automobile Machine Gun Brigade (CAMGB) at the hotel.

From July 1924 to October 2004, the building housed the local English- and French-language radio stations of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on the top seventh and eighth floors.

The Jasper Tea Room, designed by Edwin Holgate in 1929, featured Pacific Coast aboriginal art, columns carved into totem poles surrounding a dance floor, and lamps decorated with motifs of bears, eagles and crows.

From 1929 to 1991, the Canadian Grill was a softly-lit and dark-panelled below-ground restaurant where diners ate the specialty, roast prime rib of beef au jus and danced to live music.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the "therapeutic" spas offered electric therapy, ultra-violet ray lamps and alternate streams of hot and cold water to clients with nervous afflictions, polio or back problems.

[2] For years, the hotel thrived, playing host to royalty, heads of state, political figures, celebrities and members of Canada's elite.

The union protested management's decision to replace the male waiters with young women in low-cut tops to serve in the new pub, but they lost the case in court.

By 1991, Peacock Alley, a spot for socializing and "to see and be seen," situated on a wide corridor on the main level extending along the west side of the hotel, was replaced by the elegant restaurant Wilfrid's.

The new look was provided by Wilfrid's on the main level, its big windows giving light and views of the Parliament Buildings, the Rideau Canal locks and the Ottawa River.

Given its proximity to these buildings and the fact that it has served as a home and meeting place for many notable political figures over the years, the hotel has often been referred to as "the third chamber of Parliament."

[9] Coinciding with its 100th anniversary, Fairmont Château Laurier was included amongst other architecturally interesting and historically significant buildings in Doors Open Ottawa, held 2–3 June 2012.