160 PINE ST - $355,000
The Essentials
A downtown townhouse that presents like an art gallery - long white walls and a set of serene white spaces in which to frame your life.
The Bigger Picture
We sold the neighbour’s place a few weeks back. The keys changed hands just yesterday. And other clients moved into the end unit (listed by a colleague) just last Friday. It’s funny how so much business can gather suddenly around a row of houses, an intersection. But there is a stretch every year it seems when you’re making the same drive but to different houses.
We’re more than okay with this year’s flurry on Pine St. This pretty set of four townhomes with their vivid colours and their peeling exterior paint, their nearly flat roofs, remind me of wind-blasted oceanside cottages both back home and on the east coast of Canada. I imagine it raining more often than not, and reflections of the houses puddling in the road. To my mind, believe it or not, that’s a romantic vision.
Each unit is quite different from the next. 156, at the end of the row, is the modern condo, all exposed grey brick and steel staircase. 158 is a very sweet and mostly traditional design, with slate floors in the kitchen and hardwood to the front of the house. Fabulous people living in both.
This morning’s offering, 160, offers a very serene set of rooms, gallery walls, that seem to stretch to a limitless horizon. It is as if the home is a mile deep, and the ceilings a fathom tall. Some of that has to do with the fact that the dividing walls between the front hall and between the living and dining room we removed at some distant point in the past. The resulting space feels intensely modern and with all the obstacles removed, I found myself thinking more clearly in here. Weird.
The modern kitchen, with its intense faux marble countertops and its butcher block island, has sliding doors out to a pretty deck and yard. This isn’t some beachfront spread at the Hamptons, but it does feel a sort of oasis, a retreat from the hubbub. I stayed for a week in Brooklyn last year and remember looking down from our rented apt into a set of gardens much like this one - urban rectangles brightened with slabs of painted deck and the cotton curve of a hammock suspended between fence post. This is some of that: your big city/neighbourhood crash-pad.
There are two bedrooms upstairs, but there are also nearly three. There is a sweet room at the back of the house all set up with a single bed and a dresser and a chair. It works. And if I showed up for a weekend and this is where I was put, I’d be a happy camper. It’s the sort of room in which you imagine Leonard Cohen writing early poems - a spartan experience with all the rubbish noise stripped away. We like it very much. But we won’t call it a bedroom; you might feel differently and never forgive us. It’s an office, maybe, or a reading room.
There is a little park next door, all bedraggled and right next to the lane in which everyone parks. And the Memorial Centre is just up the street with its splashpad and its dog park, it’s fantastic Sunday market (returning soon, I hope). Princess St is what, about a ten-minute walk? And the university campus is maybe another ten? A few blocks east along Pine and you’ll intersect with Cherry St, and can wind from there into the Fruit Belt, and over to Friendship Park, and finally McBurney.
You’re close to the heart of things, is my point. And living really well and prettily besides. And surely those are not the worst ambitions to have in your real estate search.
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The iGuide tour is here. And the plan is to review any offers on Friday August 21 at 4 pm.
The house has deeded access to a right-of-way that runs along the rear of the four properties. If the laneway parking ever became a problem (and we’re convinced it won’t), you could just move your hammock up a few feet and pull into the yard.
