300 Sydenham St - SOLD

The Essentials

A three-bedroom semi-detached century home around the corner from McBurney Park and three blocks from downtown Princess St. Really lovely, sensitive renovations, an ensuite for the principal bedroom, a side porch, and parking. Now reduced by $25,000.

The Bigger Picture

As I studied the photographs that accompany this very fine new listing, I was struck, as if for the first time, by just how pretty the city of Kingston is, and by just how steeply the land slopes towards the lake once you get downtown. There is a real hill involved. We don’t register it walking up or down Princess St, or Bay, because we do it so often, we’ve become immune to the change in altitude, acclimatized to the temperature drop. But the drone shots that were prepared for this particular sale will send me this morning on a hunt for topographical maps.

I remember learning in high school geography classes that settlements are (of course) ideally situated above and beyond the reach of floods and enemies, and the best houses survey the ground below them. They are both sanctuary and sentry. 300 Sydenham St, seen from above (thanks to She Shoots), with the Cataraqui River in the distance, along with the hills off to the side of Barriefield, is impressive illustration of urban planning well-wrought.

There is also the simple fact that it’s a darned sweet house, three blocks from the main drag and right around the corner from McBurney Park. If you move in here, life is not just laid out before you, its routines are simplified, brought closer and into sharp focus. You’re at Novel Idea browsing the bestsellers in under ten minutes, and picking out a new deck at BSE in five. If you have children you enrol them at Central Public (because it’s brilliant) and you can very nearly see them sitting at their desks, it’s so close.

It’s also an elegant home. I was taken aback when I walked in. It had been years since I was inside, and it was pre-renovation. I knew the spaces were high-ceilinged and well-organized, but I wasn’t prepared for the sense of glamour, the immediate feeling that my life was somehow, in some small way, improved merely by my standing mid-living room, looking through that grand front window, attuned to the sudden silence, the perfect stillness of the air and, to a pleasing extent, my mind.

There are three bedrooms here, and the principal comes in two parts, with an ensuite hidden off to one side, like a secret room. You’ll have to visit to see exactly what I mean, or study the floorplans a while. The shared bathroom is a white jewel of subway tile and marble floor, and the banister alongside as you move up or down stairs has been refinished as finely as any I’ve seen. It should hang in a gallery, like the mast of a ship, the best tree in the forest.

There is a side porch and there is parking behind the house, as well as a small garden (all you need, surely, with the park just a casual frisbee toss away).

We think it might be one of the best. you’ll see this close to the main drag this season, particularly at this price-point. But we’re going to say something like that, aren’t we? It’s the job, to shine the brightest possible light. Thing is, that job is made so much easier when properties like this one are what we get to focus on. Call us and we’ll show you what we mean, and why we’re excited.