The Four Mile pub complex could be up and running soon after a fire damaged the building’s kitchen on Tuesday, View Royal Fire Chief Paul Hurst said.
The power was back on Wednesday morning and remediation companies were at the site by 7 a.m., he said.
“There’s people working in there hard right now to get it cleaned and get it going,” Hurst said, calling the building a landmark in the region.
The fire has been classified as accidental, he said, noting insurance companies will likely do their own investigation.
A stove in the kitchen, which is between the pub and the restaurant, was too close to a wall, causing a fire in the wall’s interior over time, the fire chief said.
The 150-year-old Tudor-style building’s age and the number of renovations over the years made fighting the fire complex, he said.
“You’ve got floors on floors and ceilings under ceilings,” Hurst said, adding it was difficult to determine where the fire started.
A four-room cottage built by Peter Calvert, who came to Victoria from Scotland in 1849, was originally on the site. Calvert later constructed a roadhouse that served stagecoaches and provided refreshment to travellers.
Following Prohibition, the roadhouse went out of business; it reopened in the late 1940s as the Lantern House Inn, a dining-and-dancing establishment. According to fourmilehouse.com, the upstairs housed a brothel that was raided by police before being shut down.
The site was unused from the early 1950s to 1979, when it was purchased and extensively renovated by present owners Graham and Wendy Haymes, who are currently out of the country.
The building had a small kitchen fire in 2011 but business was suspended for only a day.
A sprinkler system installed during a renovation in 2007 extinguished the fire, which a security video revealed was caused by a container of cleaning rags being accidentally kicked under a convection oven.
