136 ORDNANCE ST - SOLD

The Essentials

A very (very) sweet semi-detached two-bedroom brick home almost at the corner of McBurney Park. To my eye it’s like a block of vanilla ice cream was just pulled from the freezer.

The Bigger Picture

136 Ordnance St is a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath semi-detached brick century home a half-block from McBurney Park. It’s been painted a rich cream, and comes across in morning’s haze as slightly soft-edged, almost as if packed with goose down. At the same time it feels rigorously built, something whipped up in an advanced geometry class, a composition of perfect rectangles and ninety-degree angles. How tall can we make this box, how distant the back wall?

I can even see why you might, after a viewing, look around warily for hidden cameras, thinking that surely Ashton Kutcher and Alan Funt are yucking it up in the garden. It’s all just too good, you think; there must be a catch, a waiver to sign, this must be a joke. I mean, just look at it: those far-off tin ceilings in the kitchen, and the black concrete counters, as if a hundredweight of liquorice had been pressed into oil- and knife-resistant slabs. There’s the Miele gas stove lifted from a Michelin star restaurant in Rome and yet also so sleek it must be something that hasn’t quite been invented yet. The stylish wood stove set in the front room means that you can rest, whenever you want, in a mountaintop ski chalet. The elevated deck and the stone patio, the views from outside like a supercut of Downtown Urban.

You just don’t get the opportunity to buy houses like this, do you? Something so worldly? At this sort of price? There are two bedrooms upstairs, but the landing is an office, an art space, there is more than enough real estate there that a third bedroom could be built over a long weekend. There is a walk-in closet and second-floor laundry, a clawfoot tub in the main bathroom that feels distinctly film-set. It makes you want to laugh when you’ve had a chance to take it all in, laugh in that astonished sort of way you might laugh when your lottery numbers come up.