Clevelands House began with Charles and Fanny Minett who settled on the property in 1869.  By 1875, they had cleared enough property to farm the land and began to take in summer visitors.  In the early 1880’s they designed and built a new hotel without blueprints, using lumber from the property. The original building was two storeys, with eight bedrooms, dining and living room areas and a kitchen wing. The long wide verandah added architectural detail to a relatively plain building, providing a social space, shade and cooling breezes.

This original Clevelands House was a prime example of the typical vernacular Muskoka hotel of the 1880s.  It, like many of Muskoka’s hotels, grew from small operations to larger ones such as Beaumaris and Windermere, beginning as tourist houses run by settlers who let out one or two rooms to the traveling public. 

When Minett chose to enlarge the house in 1891, he opted for a third floor addition with a mansard roof and, most significantly, a four-story octagonal tower on one end of the lodge, to mimic the lines of a ship in reference to the steamboats plying the lakes. It was also the first reference to the Queen Anne style of architecture that appeared on the lakes.

One of Clevelands House’s greatest attractions was the lakeside refreshment stand and dance hall. The lakeside complex, started in 1924, with the opening of the refreshment stand, offered guests a soda fountain and snack counter. In 1928, Minnett expanded the refreshment stand to include a casual dining space and a dance floor, together known as the Casino.

Clevelands House is a three-and-a-half storey, irregular plan, wood frame construction with a hip roof, a hexagonal dormer with a hip roof on the southeast corner, cedar shake shingles on the third storey, stucco on the first and second storeys, a small bay window on the southeast corner of the third storey, a combination of picture windows and sash windows on all storeys, a single door entrance flanked by small rectangular windows on the south side of the east elevation, a porch with a second storey balcony above the entrance, a wraparound porch on the southeast corner, and a three storey verandah with a hip roof and square posts just north of the entrance. The property also consists of a two storey, rectangular plan boathouse restaurant with a gable roof, horizontal plank siding, large rectangular windows, and a balcony on the eastern half of the second storey.