2 GRENVILLE ROAD - SOLD
The Essentials
The bungalow at 2 Grenville Road is a mid-century marvel set on the wildest, prettiest half acre we’ve seen at the city’s heart, bar none. The Rideau Trail runs past the back fence, so you can walk right out the door and head for Ottawa. We’d suggest you pack a lunch. If that seems ambitious you can just head to the tennis courts, or up to the well-groomed community park. All of which matters only if you can bear to leave the house itself. I’d find an excuse to repeatedly wander from the slate hall to the big fireplace for another look around the kingdom. Or I’d collect myself at the side windows where the limestone walkway starts other side of the glass, or read the newspaper on the elevated deck. I’d lounge in the splendid, bright kitchen, or down below in the walkout family room that must surely have been imported from the Adirondacks. There are four bedrooms (two on each floor) and two bathrooms, an attached garage, and a loft just begging for development. It’s a spacious, quietly spectacular sort of house. Imagine rounding a familiar corner and seeing the love of your life dressed in old cords and a Shetland wool sweater, the sun flaring at their back like a pair of wings. Well it’s a lot like that.
The Bigger Picture
On Saturdays when I was just a kid, a bit younger than my son is now, I used to ride my bike from my parents’ house in Garsington, just outside Oxford, England, over to Wheatley, where I went to school. I’d meet a friend there and for hours we’d play tennis on a court surrounded by towering cedars and a gnarled wire fence, with an asphalt surface that had heaved in the corners and which could have been used strategically, I suppose, if we were just a bit better than we were at the art of shot placement. At dusk we’d ride home completely shattered, and it would be Monday morning before I felt whole again.
I remember the air felt damp in all that blue shade, and that the balls we used, if hit hard enough, would sometimes squirm right through the fence and collapse into the soft litter of toffee-brown needles. We’d hunt them down and brush them off as delicately as if they were truffles. A bit further out was the school swimming pool, and beyond that the moat and the converted manor house where we learned about the effects of glaciation on the landscape of eastern Ontario. I had no idea, of course, that one day I’d live a life more or less lifted from those textbooks, one that still has me fleeing, whenever I can, to the glacial till north of Kingston, parking roadside with half a notion to write and the rest of me wanting to just keep going until I hit permafrost. I have lived much of my life, I realize, wanting to run away.
I might feel differently if I lived at 2 Grenville Road.
It’s those tennis courts you can see through the trees (resurfaced tennis courts at that!) that have launched me briefly in recent days across the Atlantic to a life once lived, and provided the nostalgic opening to this new bit, but it’s the house itself that stays with me as I sit at home in downtown Kingston, thinking a while on this very fine new listing.
I would move for this house, I suppose that’s what I’m saying. Pack up all the treasures and carry them on my back across town. I’d go that mile west to inhabit its glorious low-slung mid-century sprawl, and to experience every day the way it perches, like a sharp-eyed bird, above woods and gardens rampant with fox and rabbit, abuzz with cicada and the moonward trajectory of the immense cottonwood down near a property line that separates this property from the Rideau Trail and the long hike to Ottawa.
Grenville Park is an oasis, a refuge, a whispered secret, an impossibly lovely enclave at the city’s heart. And I could live here. Could pad from the picture window at the back of the house to the kitchen in the east and on to the table parked at the southern limit, next to the window that gives onto untouchable forest. Or descend to the lower level to sit before the quieted fieldstone fireplace and read again from a favourite book. The house can nearly be made that way into a theatre, the world transformed into an unforgettable film in which you are the lead.
You can walk the place yourself via the virtual tour below. You should do that. I’ll wait here. I’d recommend that you stop a while at the living room window. It’s a still photo, sure, but there is the genuinely wild sensation of a world truly alive out there beyond the wall of glass. Well that’s what you see every morning. And it’s never once going to be the same. It’s never going to do anything but thrill you.
I’ve talked plenty of times before about this or that place being a rare offering. But 2 Grenville Road makes me wish now that I’d saved the sentiment. Because I don’t know when a house quite like this one will come along again. That mix of architectural inquisitiveness and natural wonder. It is a house that straddles the border between what must be done every day and why we do it. Another way of putting it is that most of us go to work so that we can come home. And if that’s true, why would you not live here?
