120 DUNDAS ST - REDUCED TO $619,000
The Essentials
A three-bedroom detached house like someplace lifted from a Raymond Carver story - not a word out of place and a bottle of booze on a high shelf for the odd moment when life gets dark. A sanctuary, a place to hide out while you find yourself.
The Bigger Picture
There is something otherworldly, something utterly fantastic, about 120 Dundas St. Maybe it’s simply that I find the yellow door so transporting, conjuring for reasons that are beyond me, the Japanese Film class I took at the university back in the 1980s. Or is it the complicated stylings in the brickwork on the face of the house, as if a quizzical expression has been sketched there - a fabulously arched eyebrow, a stony smile. Or the way the stuccoed second floor feels like the maple layer on an elaborate wedding cake. Perhaps it’s just that I feel I’d write more interestingly if I set my desk in the sunroom at the back of the house. The words thundering in like hail. I see Aslan out there, sun-dappled and wrestling with a soft beach ball, claws pawing at the off-gassing vinyl. Dylan Thomas rewriting Under Milkwood in the garage. A tear in the last century’s fabric.
But I’m just messing around aren’t I, wasting your time? None of the above is going to sell the house. Some days (most of them really) I just need to get over myself.
One more serious stab, then:
120 Dundas St is the only house I know that makes a pure, chemical, irrefutable sort of sense. Three bedrooms on the second floor and a totally mad space off in the corner where you write grocery lists, or listen to self-improvement tapes. It’s too tight up there for a loom, but knitting needles might work. The wondrous clack-clack all along the landing of wearable art being summoned into the world. Who knows what they were thinking when they agreed to this alcove, but damn it, give them a medal anyway.
The kitchen is a muted green I haven’t seen since there was a Zeller’s or was it Kresge’s, on Princess. The one with the mid-century lunch counter. The pies for that restaurant, the lime mousse, were dreamed up right here on Dundas Street. True story.
The fireplace works a treat, and if push comes to shove a WETT report isn’t out of the question. And did you notice the windows either side of that fire? Like handwritten books pilfered from a cliffside monastery and destined to forever give off whitest light, as well as the answers to everything you ever asked.
It’s radiators rather than forced air, and how brilliant is that? The air moves only when you speak, or when you pace back and forth considering how lucky you are, and how you don’t usually make such brilliant decisions.
I could go on. It’s mad tempting. But you’ll be calling me soon to book a showing and I want to be ready for you. Here, I’m already looking for my jacket (it’s waterproof, so I don’t have to worry about the rain); what are you waiting for?
The Virtual Tour
The Floor Plans
