182 CLERGY ST E. - $859,000
The Essentials
A reduced price on this very elegant and superbly renovated three- or four-bedroom family home just south of McBurney Park. A spectacular kitchen with skylights, and a limestone-walled courtyard. An attached drive-through garage.
The Bigger Picture
The exposed limestone and brick wall in the magnificent vaulted kitchen at 182 Clergy St E., just south of McBurney Park, extends right out to the garden. It feels like a magic trick and I even walked back and forth several times, just taking it in, figuring it out. It is as if some line is being crossed, some exquisite law of physics being proven. There is even a mirror leaned against the limestone outside like a prop, or a door to a state in which houses like this one are commonplace rather than rare as gold.
That garden, with its wire statuary (not staying) and its low-to-the-ground creepers, its lupins, and its rock slabs, its weather-greyed decking, its hammock, and the sheer cedar exterior of that kitchen, is an absurdly pleasing blend of colours and textures, of verdant greens and rough greys. It is a scene made to show us what is possible outdoors. I have pulled it up from the gallery below so you don’t have to wait to see it, so that you believe me. Six months of the year I would be content to just sit out here, by far the most ordinary part of that composition. It is good, I reason, to be humble.
There was a Steinway in the living room until recently, which tells you something about scale. But that lovely instrument made its way to Quebec last weekend, and the change in the way you move through that room now, in the space that has appeared in its place, the pool of light, feels nearly musical.
There is an office on this level, though I could see it as a guest room too. At the moment a pilates machine is set up, all intimidating pulleys and sliding platforms. It is part of a home gym but it intimidated me, that alien workout machine. I would replace it with a bike on a trainer, then set up a modest screen that allowed me to pedal through the Andes. The world at my fingertips.
Two of the three big bedrooms upstairs have views over the garden, so it will be like waking in Narnia every morning, only without the wars and the lion, and the third overlooks Clergy St - the park is just to your left and the downtown core a couple of blocks to the right. Central Public is a block over.
The laundry room is on this level too, where it should be, and with the heavy machinery smartly organized behind folding doors, along with a sink. The work, in other words, can always be hidden away.
There is an attached garage, and those of you who live downtown will know just how precious that is. This one has a full-size door at the back too, so you you can wheel through your fertilizers and your roses, your barbecue and your catamaran.
It is a very special property and there won’tl be anything comparable this season. You are close to the university and the lake and the hospitals, and you are decidedly pampered. If you pop champagne on day one, just be sure to notice how that kitchen ceiling is so far off the cork doesn’t even come close.
The Virtual Tour
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The Floor Plans
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