Niagara home and garden show has roots
It’s a home show that gets thousands of locals out of the house.
Back in 2011, the Greater Niagara Region Home & Garden Show was the first-ever event for Scotiabank Convention Centre. Admission was free for the weekend, and the event attracted about 30,000 people.
Six years later, event organizers Show Technology Productions from San Antonio is doing about 25 home and garden shows a year in the U.S., but the one Canadian show hasn’t changed: Niagara Falls.
“Scotia bank( Convention Centre) is fantastic,” says show manager Megan Walker. “And we love our exhibitors. We have people that have been in the show since the very beginning.”
With about 110 exhibitors and 10,000 people walking through the door over three days, the show is still one of the convention centre’s biggest annual events.
This year’s show featured HGTV’s Damon Bennett, who was Mike Holmes’ right hand man on three separate series (Holmes on Holmes, Holmes Inspection, Holmes Makes it Right). He did home renovation semi- nars both Saturday and Sunday.
Other seminars touched on the importance of bees in the garden, the importance of landscape lighting, and pre-planning with estates and wills.
Kids were kept occupied with the Canadian Raptor Conservancy’s birds of prey show.
Walker says every home and garden show is different simply because trends change each year. For 2017, she’s noticing more outdoor spaces being renovated.
The housing boom has also brought real estate agents to the show for the first time.
“We always try to (incorporate) what the latest trends are in the home and garden industry,” says Walker, though kitchens and baths are a “staple” of every show.
Despite soaring home prices, she says the show is not for the privileged: “We are catering to the average person, the majority.”