123 FLORENCE ST - SOLD

The Essentials

A strikingly renovated Balsam Grove home with in-law suite potential, in a part of the city convenient to the downtown core and the west end shops, as well as the Rideau Trail.

The Bigger Picture

A strikingly renovated Balsam Grove home. I like the sound of that, the crisp summing up, it’s like the summary of a hit movie. But to expand a little, to move out from the centre, I’d draw your attention first to the fact that despite its modest face there are either three or four bedrooms, it’s your call, depending on how you use the room at the front of the main floor. For me it’s an office. Install me in there and I’d write better copy going forward, I know I would. But if you’ve got guests in the for the weekend, or a fear of heights, perhaps this is where you sleep.

There are three new bathrooms too, one on each level, and a superb deck atop the double garage, like something installed on a Mediterranean yacht that’s likely to how up next in a Bond film. There is a garden ringed by towering cedars fit for any self-respecting Cotswolds manor house, and in-law suite potential, and some of the best refinished oak floors I have seen anywhere.

In short it’s a bewilderingly pretty, intensely bright, crisp mid-century house, with distant horizons and recent upgrades whichever way you turn. There I’ve summarized it for you again. Take your pick.

There is also, if you arrive at, say 10 am, when such places usually throw open their doors, the sense you are in an art gallery, but one unusually devoted to the house itself, which is some trick. All those fresh white walls and that confident, modern air give the impression that maybe you needed a ticket to get in. It occurs to me that there really should be reproductions of a house like this for sale at the Lego store.

The appliances are all new, and the roof too, along with the eavestroughs and furnace. All the upgrades taken out of the picture so that you don’t need to think about them. The lower level is completely finished and can be accessed through the attached garage. It would make smart living quarters for the gallery director, is my thought. A live-work sort of set-up.

The seller has been planting new gardens the last couple of weeks; you’ll appreciate those. And watching that happen has been a bit like watching someone write a teary goodbye to the house, a string of dark flowerbeds being topped up with riotous colour. They read like the fondest sort of footnotes.

All of this in a part of the city convenient to the downtown core and the west end shops, as well as the Rideau Trail. There is a bus stop up near the corner that will run you wherever you need to be, not that you’ll ever want to leave.