131 RAGLAN ROAD - $395,000
The Essentials
A downtown bungalow as well-finished as any home we’ve been lucky enough to list. A damn near perfect and smallish home in which to live the better-than-good life.
The Bigger Picture
To put it as plainly as possible, 131 Raglan Road is a downtown bungalow a block from McBurney Park, with two bedrooms and a marvelous finished walk-out basement that’s mostly above-grade.
Those are the true facts and I’m pretty sure spelled right too. No one’s going to call me up and complain that I sold them a bill of goods with that opening. But man, it is also selling this very special home way short.
So let’s begin again: 131 Raglan Road is a home as exquisite in its execution as any we can ever recall listing. And no, this is not hyperbole run riot. Every detail and every surface here has been lavished recently with such smart attention that it’s hard not to enter this elegant set of rooms and then simply reel about in wonder, a bit drunk on what the sellers have achieved.
We suggest more than anything that you spend some time with the pictures below, and the floor plans, then take a leisurely spin through the linked iGuide tour. Because truth is, there is just too big a gap between what I see and feel about this house, and the words that an instant later arrive in the mouth to describe it all. I am rendered not mute exactly, just slightly inadequate. It’s a humbling moment. It as if I am all of a sudden a bedraggled stranger to my own vocation.
There are planes of polished hardwood and of luminous hexagonal tile. Fields of quartz and pale oak. Porcelain and glass. Sheer walls of stainless steel. There are angles both hard and soft. There is lath and limestone that aren’t, exactly. And a gas fireplace that is. There is light pouring in enthusiastically from all sides, as if into a library of the rarest books, a concert of the brightest music. There are frosted panes that filter still more light into a nearly subterranean den, a room more private than any penthouse. There is occasionally the disorienting sense of being in a condominium suspended above Manhattan, so elevated is the whole experience. It is also as if something geologically impossible has occurred and the greyest stone has brought about the brightest diamond.
But I go on. Just a bit.
You should call your realtor – or us, if you don’t already have one – to set up a showing. Because if what you want most is to live near the heart of things in a detached home with parking and a pretty yard, a fireplace around which to gather with a loved one or two, we think it incredibly unlikely you will find better.
The tour I mentioned is right here. And the Realtor.ca details are here.
Any offers will be reviewed after lunch on Friday March 22.
