21 BYRON CRESCENT - SOLD

The Essentials

A very stylish three-bedroom Calvin Park side split that backs onto Rodden Park. Your world just got so much bigger.

The Bigger Picture

I’ve long thought that if I wasn’t living downtown I’d hunt for a new home in Calvin Park. I’d fill it with mid-century teak furniture and wander the streets some, appreciating all that late-mid-century architecture.

I find it hard to believe that how however many miles I logged I’d find much better than the lovely three-bedroom side-split at 21 Byron Crescent (circa 1966). Have you seen, for instance, the dramatic face it presents to the world, all blue-black, and lemon-yellow, all right angle and angel brick, all sinuous landscaping curve. A classic of the form but rendered in distinctly 21st century garb.

What you don’t see from the road is that the house backs onto Rodden Park, even has a gate joining your modest acreage to its expansive fields. It is the stuff of Victorian novels. Your children will grow up here with an escape room, sorta, fashioned from emerald lawns and evergreen statuary. They will toboggan the long worry-free slope on the back side of the hill. They will sneak around the greenhouse and they will bring back breathless stories of derring-do, of cat burglars and downed satellites. They will be happy and therefore, with any luck, you will be happy too.

All of which is reason enough to buy the house, surely. We live for our children, after all. But even if there are no kids it strikes me this is a noteworthy property, something rather special.

The house itself is certainly no slouch. With a freshly painted and mostly open floor plan, a gas fireplace set beneath pot lights and sliding doors to the garden, it has the feeling of a model home, an inn you’ve booked for the long weekend. There is a re-insulated lower level rec room, and basement laundry, and the bedrooms are all roomy and high-ceilinged.

I sat for a long while considering what it was that hooked me most. I considered the way the light hits the house and the drive in from the corner, the way it sits so proud above the street. The glimpses I got from the living room of that large park. The stories waiting to be written. And they’re all part of it. But in the end, I realized, it just feels like home, it feels right, and I don’t remember the last time I had exactly that reaction.