Hundred-year-old facades, rebuilt to outlast the originals.

When Victoria’s Douglas Hotel became the Hotel Rialto, the developers faced two problems at once: the white glazed terracotta cladding its eleven columns was beyond saving, and the building needed seismic upgrading the original tile could never support.

Szolyd cast thin white Ductal shells that replicate the texture of the original glazed tiles — grout lines included — and clad the existing columns with them. The colour is integral to the material, so there is nothing to repaint, and a street-level anti-graffiti coating deals with downtown. The restoration put the building on the cover of Construction Canada.

The Trapp Block (1913) and Holbrook (1880s) anchor New Westminster’s historic Columbia Street. When the buildings were redeveloped, nearly 1,500 original terracotta pieces were dismantled, photographed, numbered and catalogued by restoration contractor Atlantis Rausch — and the blocks too damaged to save had to be made again from scratch.

That was Szolyd’s scope: brought in just months before the pieces were needed on the building, the shop built 43 custom molds and cast 90 Ductal replacements in under four months, matching profiles that had been out of production for a century.

On the Scott Building’s 1912 facade, several of the ornamental elements were failing. Szolyd cast replacements that install side by side with the surviving originals — a partial restoration, so the building keeps its own face instead of trading it for a reproduction.

The pair of rosettes below is the whole argument in one frame: the one on the right is over a hundred years old, glazed terracotta, straight off the building. The one on the left is new out of our mold, not yet sealed. Profile for profile they read as one — you tell them apart by age, not by shape. The cast hands come from the same restoration programme.

When Vic High’s seismic upgrade reached the facade, every modillion block under the cornice was a hazard — in an earthquake they would simply leave the building. The glazed terracotta they’re made of hasn’t been manufactured in generations, and its glaze carries a mica fleck no supplier could match. The easy answer was a full facade replacement: strip a century of face off the school and start again.

Szolyd’s answer was to match the material instead. It took more than forty iterations of background colour and aggregate — and when the right brown chip turned out to be the wrong size and shape, we built a small rock factory to grind and round it to the original’s particle size. The new blocks read as the old ones, so School District 61 could replace only what was failing. A partial restoration, on a building that keeps its own face — that match is the whole point of doing this in UHPC.