A story about family, architecture, and a farm that almost had a different name

Every winery has a beginning. Ours just happens to start with an architect, an engineer, and a friendly argument about practicality versus beauty.

The name Elephant Island often catches people off guard. It sounds distant, maybe tropical – somewhere you’d need a passport to visit. The truth is far closer to home, and far more personal.

A Trailblazer With a Vision

Long before there were vines, orchards, or a tasting room, there was my grandmother. She was one of Canada’s first female architects – a trailblazer who believed deeply in design, light, and the way spaces could shape how people feel. She was also one of the most creative and progressive women I have met, and she was born in 1917.

Later in her career, while teaching at the School of Architecture at the University of British Columbia alongside my grandfather, an opportunity arose to take a retirement pension buyout. She chose to take it, not as an exit, but as a beginning.

Her intention was simple and bold at the same time: invest in land and build a farm in the Okanagan.

The Search for the Right Place

My grandparents drove up and down the valley, exploring roads that twist between lake and hillside, looking for a place that felt right.

Then came one of those quintessential Okanagan moments, the kind you can’t plan. They were staying across the lake, and the clouds parted momentarily, in a way that can only happen in the silvery sage lights of the Valley. Sunbeams broke through the clouds and landed squarely on Naramata. It looked, as they later described it, like heaven had picked a spot on the map.

An inquiry was made. A property was found.

My grandmother fell in love immediately.

My grandfather, an engineer by training and temperament, was less certain.

The White Elephant

He worried the purchase might be impractical – a beautiful idea that wouldn’t return its investment. In good-natured debate, he called it a “white elephant.”

She, of course, saw something else entirely.

Their final professional collaboration together became the design and construction of the home that still stands at Elephant Island today. It was the architect and the engineer working side by side, in their most cherished production: her eye for aesthetics, his instinct for structure and feasibility. Beauty and practicality meeting somewhere in the middle, and as they often do in long partnerships, with a few passionate debates along the way.

During that process, the phrase lingered. White elephant.
Add to it the claybank setting, the sense of place, the distinctness of the land – and her fabulous creativity, the name formed.

Elephant Island.

Not because there were elephants.

Not because there was an island.

But because the name held the memory of that debate, that love of place, and that shared act of creation.

Summers at Elephant Island

From then on, Elephant Island became part of our family vocabulary – and my childhood geography. It was where I spent my summer vacations, returning year after year.

Back at school, when teachers or classmates asked where I’d been, saying “Elephant Island” sounded wonderfully exotic. It conjured images far more adventurous than the truth: a five-hour drive east into the Okanagan Valley, to a hillside farm filled with sunlight, fruit trees, and family stories.

No elephants.

No islands.

Just a name that carried imagination with it wherever it went.

A Name That Grew Into a Place

Over time, Elephant Island became more than a clever or whimsical title. It grew into an identity … a shorthand for creativity, independence, and a willingness to follow vision even when practicality raised an eyebrow.

Today, when guests ask where the name comes from, we smile. The answer is rooted in architecture and partnership, in sunlight breaking through clouds, and in one of the best bedtime storytellers every … my Grandmother.

Elephant Island isn’t about geography.
It’s about seeing beauty before it becomes obvious.

And perhaps most of all, it’s about believing that sometimes the things called “white elephants” turn out to be the places that shape a lifetime.