236 PARK ST - SOLD!
The Essentials
A two-storey midtown home with extraordinary gardens, a large workshop, eat-in kitchen, skylights and sunroom. More character than Robert De Niro.
The Bigger Picture
To describe 236 Park St, I have discovered, is to come face to face with one’s inadequacies. Which is not the worst thing that can happen. Immaculate arguments can be made for good doses of humility. But it is nonetheless difficult for me to find myself coming up so short, producing only the palest sepia version of a very special house. I have begun again. And again. For days.
I’d be better to spread glossy eight by tens across a table, I think, like a fancy designer or casting director, and point at the way colours have been mixed, and the way light works its way between walls, the mid-century flow of the place, like water into a series of bright pools. There is a new way forward here, I swear, a potential being realised. This is housing, but elevated. There is solace to be gained within its walls, and serious comfort.
Put another way, this two-storey mid-town home, with its extravagant, nearly bewildering gardens of hollyhock and fern, its detached metal-capped workshop and its terra cotta tile, its sunroom and its stone hearth and oak floors, its skylights and hangout spots, its gracious archways and its kitchen full of pot-hangers and acres of countertop, is unlike anything you were expecting. None of us could see this coming. It is, in all the important ways, better than most of what has gone before.
There are two bedrooms at the moment, but there used to be three and a weekend’s work would make it that way again. I like the front-to-back space that has been created, and I would leave it this way, would rehearse my Ted Talk before a large imaginary audience. But if there are children who need sleep then I can see reinstalling the wall. The result would offer a pleasing symmetry and the knowledge that you were close to those who matter most, should you be needed.
There is a bathroom on each level. The pantry has laundry hook-up behind the extra fridge. And the basement has been set up for unexpected drop-ins. You drop a good novel down the stairs and everyone is good for the weekend.
The Virtual Tour
The Floor Plans
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The Gallery
