Three summers ago, a walk from Mattick's Farm down to Cordova Bay beach had a dead patch in it. The windows at 5109 Cordova Bay Road were dark. Dog owners did mental math about which hour and which season let them off leash. And the bend where Fowler and Sayward Roads meet Cordova Bay Road still moved traffic faster than anyone walking a stroller wanted it to.
None of that was one project. It was three separate, unrelated fights that had been dragging on for years, some for closer to a decade. But if you've walked that same stretch this summer, it reads like a single plan finally executed. It isn't. It's just that three long-running fixes landed in the same window, and the geography happens to line them up end to end.
The building that closed twice
The building at 5109 Cordova Bay Road has been a village fixture since the 1920s, when it opened as an ice cream stand and general store under the McMorran family, who'd been shaping Cordova Bay since arriving in Victoria in 1890. By mid-century it had become the kind of place where people went for dinner, drinks and dancing. Kate Phoenix bought it in 2011 and reopened it the following year as the Beach House restaurant.
It closed for good in late August 2023, when Phoenix retired, and the building has sat empty along the waterfront for nearly three years since. That's a long stretch for a landmark this visible to sit dark in a village this small.
On October 27, 2025, Saanich council unanimously approved a temporary use permit that gives the space a new life: a 3,761-square-foot art gallery and café with a take-out window on the main floor, and a kitchen, bar and restaurant leading onto 1,500 square feet of patio on the lower level, according to reporting in the Times Colonist. Council also approved a development variance permit to cover the site's parking shortfall.
Saanich Coun. Karen Harper made the case for why a temporary permit made sense here rather than a straight rezoning. The arrangement lets the district try the concept out, and if it works, "you can actually extend a temporary use permit, basically in perpetuity," a comment reported by CHEK News. The permit runs three years. The building's next chapter is now legally cleared. The buildout is the part still to come.
The beach at the other end of the walk
Keep walking north along the water and you hit the other half of this story: the beach itself. Saanich's parks strategy reclassified the entire Cordova Bay beach area as off-leash, with no seasonal or hourly windows attached, a change the Cordova Bay Association for Community Affairs flagged as making it the only beach in Saanich, Victoria or Esquimalt without those restrictions.
That's worth sitting with for a second. Every other beach in the region asks dog owners to check a calendar or a clock. Cordova Bay, once the paperwork catches up, won't. As of the association's last published update on this policy, from 2025, the strategy itself had council approval, but the bylaw language that would make it enforceable hadn't been finalized. It's a policy decided in principle, still working its way through the process that makes it official. Worth knowing before you plan a summer evening around it.
What changed underfoot along Lochside
The middle third of the walk, the stretch of Lochside Drive between McMinn Park and Mattick's Farm, is where the most literal fix landed. New speed limit signage now caps that section at 30 km/h, and Saanich installed an advance turn signal that finally lets drivers turn south onto the highway safely, closing out roughly five years of advocacy by the CBACA Transportation Committee and former president Alex Izett.
That kind of fix rarely makes headlines outside the neighbourhood it serves, but five years is a long time to push for one traffic light. The lowered limit on Lochside is part of a broader phase of Saanich's residential speed policy, and the CBACA's own planning page notes that residents can expect new signage and slower traffic on additional streets starting in 2026, with more phases still to come. The village core itself, the stretch of Cordova Bay Road near the Plaza, is next in line for the same treatment.
One loop, three separate fights
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only experienced these as isolated headlines over the past three years. The Beach House closure was 2023 news. The off-leash reclassification was a parks policy vote most people scrolled past. The Lochside signal was a five-year municipal grind that finally closed. None of them referenced the other two.
But geographically, they sit on the same half-mile loop: start at Mattick's Farm, walk the newly signed section of Lochside Drive past McMinn Park, reach a beach that's shedding its leash restrictions, and end at a waterfront building that's about to have people in it again for the first time since 2023. That loop didn't work particularly well as a single walk three years ago. It does now, or will very soon, once the Beach House buildout catches up to its permit and the leash bylaw catches up to its strategy.
Nobody at Saanich council or the CBACA planned it that way. It's just what happens when a handful of long, separate community fights all clear their last hurdle in roughly the same window. For anyone who's lived here through the years of watching that building sit empty, or the years of checking a sign before letting the dog run, the loop finally closing feels like more than coincidence, even though it technically is.
If you're the kind of Cordova Bay resident who tracks this stuff because you love this place, not because you're thinking about a move, that's exactly the spirit this update is written in. And if a day ever comes when you're curious what a home on this loop, or anywhere else in Saanich East, is actually worth in today's market, Kash Burley is a longtime local resource for that. Get your free home valuation whenever you're ready. No rush. The loop will still be here.
