64 WELLINGTON ST - A NEW PRICE OF $798,000
The Essentials
A downtown duplex the way you imagine they should be, and just across the park from the university and up the street from Lake Ontario. Marvelous renovations and a garden oasis. Perfect as a pied à terre with additional income from upstairs.
The Bigger Picture
64 Wellington St is a rather brilliant and vanishingly rare sort of duplex (circa 1841, stucco slathered over brick), situated across City Park from the university, and just up the street from Lake Ontario. The downtown core is the same distance in the other direction. You are perfectly located, in other words.
The renovations here are both extensive and marvelous (I’ll add a list), the appliances are high-end, and the garden, well the garden is an oasis. There is ample parking, abundant character, and nothing left to do or to worry about. The shingles, because everyone asks about the shingles, were replaced last year, It is perfect, it seems to me, as a downtown pied à terre with the added benefit of upstair’s income.
The two one-bedroom units both feature solid-wood custom kitchens and exposed brickwork and clawfoot tubs. It is hard in lots of ways to choose between them, but if I lived there myself, I would write at a drafting table set middle of the room beyond the ground-floor kitchen, I think, staring both wistfully and hard out to the interlocking brick patio, trying to unravel in words its dappled shade, its history of the world. I would write better sentences here, I know I would. It is the sort of place you live in and become an expert.
I would also sleep better than I ever have, at the back of the house and far from the madding crowd, in that pine-ceilinged bedroom with the garden wrapped around it like a quilt. It is a retreat from the world. The sort of place you never have to make your own coffee. The parlour at the front of the house belongs in a magazine, or that Hardy novel you’ve been meaning to re-read.
Some, of course, will view the property less romantically, perhaps installing their children, one above the other, while they’re at Queen’s, giving them every possible advantage. And fair enough, I understand that our futures are all different.
64 Wellington St - Features and Renovations
Location, Location, Location - of course. Everything is walkable. Three blocks from the lake, the waterfront path, five blocks from the market, restaurants, banks, shops, and skating in the winter, three blocks to City Park and the University and Hospital just beyond. Bus stop one block away on Bagot at Earl.
Parking -- private drive can accommodate two, even three cars - a rarity in Sydenham Ward!!!
Fully fenced yardwith landscaped patio, perennial beds, and custom shed.
Historic half-double built by James Linton c.1841.
Legally duplexed, with separate side entrance to #2.
Exposed brick fireplaces and original pine floors.
Renovations by Mark Peabody 2003.
Landscaping by Scott Wentworth
High end appliances - counter-depth Liebherr refrigerator, Jennair stove, Fisher & Paykel two-drawer dishwasher (one drawer needs repair at the moment), all from F.W. Black. Roof fully reshingled 2022
Furnace replaced, 2023, with smart thermostat
Loewen windows and doors throughout (except #2 bedroom)
Chimney(front) repointed, chimney (rear) capped, 2022
Dry basement under back room via flip-up set of stairs gives easy access to furnace, hot water tanks, sump pit, and storage.
The Virtual Tour
The Floor Plans
The Gallery
I like the way the photographs organized themselves here. It feels as if a bird descended slowly and took in the outside first, a a bird would, and then worked the inside from front to back, ending eventually at the front door. It’s unusual, but it provokes a different sort of appreciation of the property, I think, and I like that.
