302 SYDENHAM ST - $525,000

The Essentials

A three-bedroom semi-detached downtown home with gas fireplace and acute angles. Also a garden, and parking for two or three cars.

The Bigger Picture

I checked the floor plans (more about those at the bottom of this piece) and it looks to me that there actually are a couple of right angles at 302 Sydenham St. I had thought it a pure mix of the acute and the obtuse, a sly nod to German Expressionist cinema. Nosferatu stashed in the downstairs closet with the lights off. But I’m wrong (again!), and a couch or a stereo will sit snug into the corner, so long as you pick the right corner.

To my mind, all this narrowing and widening, the opening up of spaces like a pair of bellows exercising its lungs, just adds to the character of the semi-detached home. It is the quintessential McBurney Park/Inner Harbour residence, adhering addition by addition to the northern wall of another, older home, like a child who appears suddenly at your hip.

There are three bedrooms here, and one bathroom (on the second floor), a really large living room with gas fireplace and oak strip floors, and sliding doors out to the big, private garden, and a cellar you’ll mostly ignore, as is the practice downtown. There is also plentiful parking, three spots, and if you don’t need them all yourselves, you’ll rent them to someone like me, who works downtown and is still reeling from the price increases curtside. The appliances will all stay behind and so there really isn’t much to do once your lawyer calls to tell you the sale has closed.

Perhaps that’s the key at 302: the location at the top of the hill and right downtown. You can walk to Northside in less than ten, and the Grand Theatre in, what, five minutes? McBurney Park might as well be added to your yard, so close is it, and if you fall, all teenage enthusiasm, from one of its towering trees, your friends will have you down at the hospital before you’ve even properly regained consciousness. It’s the centre of the world, then, or will be, once you move in!

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IMPORTANT NOTE: The “Hall” and stairs to cellar marked on the virtual tour and on the floor plans are actually owned by the neighbour. 302 has a right of way over these spaces to access cellar. Cellar for 302 is very small and accessed through the plywood door on left at bottom of the stairs.

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