31 Fergus St - SOLD

The Essentials

A very special three-bedroom, two-bath Kingscourt home with family room addition and garden studio.

The Bigger Picture

Kingscourt has changed a lot in the last five years. Young families have flocked into this pretty, low-slung wartime neighbourhood, wooed originally by the reasonable prices and the big lots, the big trees. That, of course, has served to increase demand and it has driven up prices. Renovations both modest and dramatic have been undertaken all over. The sound of swinging hammers competes some mornings with the avian sing-off between cardinal and robin, and the breezy, creaky sway of fir and spruce.

But even with all that frantic re-invention, you still haven’t seen a house like this one. Or at least we haven’t.

31 Fergus Street has had a full-width family room added to the rear of the house, complete with clerestory windows to the south and a much bigger window that takes up most of the eastern wall. What we have now is a serene soft-hued and well-insulated space far from the madding crowd, one with pale hardwood floors and (I realised this ten minutes in) more or less completely silent. A concert hall for the soul is what they’ve made. A resting place exactly when rest is what we need most, a clean break from the daily grind.

Look at the pictures and I think you’ll see what I mean.

The other remarkable change here is the installation of a studio into the back garden, between the house and the private deck at the back fence. (That deck itself is like something from an island resort. String lights out there, and stage the table with four glasses and a ruby pitcher of Sangria painted with condensate and it’s hard not to imagine you’ve entered some new ad for Club Med).

But the studio. I’m out here for the studio. The sellers have converted what was an old workshop into the most marvelous of urban getaways. A place to work or sleep. Or a place for the teenagers to hide out or camp (only without the flapping, unmoored tarps, the rising damp, and the risk of bears). A home office. A writing studio A brilliant and private in-law suite. A yoga studio. A recording studio. A rehearsal space.

It’s all of those and that’s what separates 31 Fergus most clearly from those that have come before. There are plenty of three bedroom homes out there. And a good number of them have a nice rec room either at the back of the house, or down below. Some even have a suite of sorts in the basement with a side entrance. And those are fantastic, so long as the spaces have been sound-proofed from each other. But we just haven’t seen the extra bit put down behind the house quite this way, or quite this well.

The Virtual Tour

Click on the tour to view still photos, floor plans, or just to move around in the house, and even measure the spaces to make sure your furniture will fit.