2020 WELLINGTON ST - $395,000.
The Essentials
A very stylish small house set back from the road and nestled against a limestone cliff on four acres just outside Battersea, just up the road from the beach and the boat launch. It's brave, it's energy-efficient and it's unlike anything you've seen before.
The Bigger Picture
Where we’ll be on sunday afternoon
We adore this property. This is the second time we’ve sold it and that means that once again we sit in our office each morning wondering if there is any way for one of us to own it. Which of course is just greedy. We can’t have it all, however brilliant the prospect.
The house is marvellous, of course, drenched in brilliant Canadian Shield light that feels filtered through a diamond screen, and widescreen vistas of glass and stone - and we’ll get to those soon enough - but a good part of the attraction here has to do with the setting, which is world-class if cliffs of limestone excite you (I really think they should), and views over snow-drifted fields.
Just off the back step, a hulking glorious rock nearly the size of the house has calved from the main rockface and come to rest out there like an inscrutable sentry. It is as if the house is guarded by a stone gruffalo. If it was my place I know I’d find some way to clamber up top and just sit there, as if atop Everest. I’d send pictures to National Geographic. Other days I’d feel my way slowly along the base of the cliff looking for fossils embedded in its layers, a little hammer with me to chip them free, and I’d lay the treasures out just so on a window ledge. Other days I’d simply walk the trail along the top edge, and from there down into the back half of the property. I’d walk loops of the four acres and feel the years and all the stress melting away.
But the house itself. My god, the house. Here’s the view from the top landing. It might well be all you need:
Can you imagine this being what you see every morning as you pad from one of the two bedrooms on that upper level? The sellers have an office space set up in the corner of this landing. When the work drags surely you just look over your shoulder and all is right with the world again. The red dash you can see outside (if you can tear yourself away from the fireplace) is a canoe, by the way. You strap that to the roof of your car, or to a wheeled cart, and haul it down the hill to Dog Lake. You’ll be gone all day, or at least as long as you can bear to be away.
As you can mostly see, the living and dining rooms, along with the kitchen, are joined together in a towering great room bisected by a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace. Stacked banks of windows frame the glorious Canadian Shield landscape. The main floor bedroom (set up as a gym right now, and I’d leave it that way) will have you feel you've embarked on some wintry safari, an Ontario glamping adventure, with Richard Branson bringing you the morning coffee. There is a utility room down there too, along with the laundry, and set along the back wall is a full bathroom. Out back is a fire pit dead centre of a clearing from which you can see the outer edge of the universe some nights when the clouds pull back as if in some immense velvet theatre.
It’s not a big house (a little over 1000 s.f) but it’s not a tiny house either. The ceiling are so far off you might want to walk around with a parachute strapped to your back. It’s energy-efficient and yet feels wildly expansive too, if that makes sense. It’s kitted out with a good propane furnace and an HRV, a UV system (and great water), and customer Hunter Douglas motorized shades for the moments when all that beauty becomes unbearable, which I suppose is theoretically possible, or for when you want to watch a film in the dark, or just dance some crazy, how-did-I-get-so-lucky dance from one end of the house to the other.
Please give us a call, or write to us, if you have any questions, or would like to schedule a viewing. We’re itching to get out there again.
Here’s a link to the virtual tour. And here is the Realtor.ca listing with taxes and so on.
The Gallery
