4 BOOTH AVENUE - $750,000
The Essentials
An absurdly stylish four-season home or cottage set among the trees just ten minutes east of downtown KIngston and a two-minute walk from the St Lawrence River.
This is a co-listing with Erin Gallagher at Century 21. We did this together because we thought it would serve the sellers well, first and foremost, but also because it would be fun to compare and contrast our separate takes on the place. You should definitely check out her thoughts at https://www.gallagher.realestate
The Bigger Picture
There is something nearly monolithic about the black wooden exterior of this rather marvellous home set among the trees high above the St Lawrence river just east of Kingston. Like a sculpture lifted from Kubrick. But if monolithic feels too heavy a word (and that’s fair, given the deft, delicate execution of the house, and the decisions made inside it), I am also reminded of the charred cedar homes I drool over when I land on them in the pages of Dwell magazine, thrilling refuges clinging improbably to the steep sides of Norwegian fjord and Japanese forest, eagles scarring the same too-blue sky.
4 Booth is easier to reach than those Bond-villain getaways. You are a scant ten minutes from the downtown core, and a five-minute walk from the water. Treasure Island is across the sheltered bay and beyond the marina. After that it’s the deep waters of the St Lawrence River. Johnny Depp rehearses his Arr Mateys at the local chip stand.
It is a bolthole for you, then, an escape from the ordinary, from the Monday to Friday rigours in the city. A place to regroup, to breathe or paint, to write or simply to read. If you are even more lucky, it is the next place you will live.
The house is elegant and minimalist, aesthetically bracing. It is an exciting set of spaces that hit like a perfect poem, each landing spot welded to the next in ways that feel both organic and totally unexpected.
You will spend most of your time dead centre of the house, I expect, light pouring in from all sides. The ceilings are high enough for this to feel more opera house than living room. The galley kitchen, with its stone counters and its open shelves, (its head-height porthole, as if you have embarked on a great sea voyage) is properly connected to the rest of the house so as not to isolate whoever it is thumbing through the latest Ottolenghi for tonight’s supper.
There are two bedrooms tucked away on this level, but I’d use one as an office to write in, so I could save the splendid outbuilding for more industrial hobbies. There is a lavish bathroom too, and another up above in the loft.
I say loft, but it is surely the third bedroom, the principal suite, with its dressing area and private elevated deck, like a treehouse. I’m not sure how this set-up won’t leave you feeling you’ve arrived in one of the world’s grand hotels, with its clerestory windows like a line of text written against a backdrop of stars, and more of the herringbone floors. Even the light fixtures up here are tremendous, like scientific diagrams of the way air moves at the eye of a storm.
The finishes throughout are lovely, the heating and cooling top-notch. There is nothing here that needs your attention. Which is the point, isn’t it, when you decide to leave your ordinary routines behind and to live extraordinarily?
I’d find it hard to go outside again once I arrived, I know I would, but the steep deciduous copse out back is begging for explorers when the neighbourhood waterfront loses its sunlight. And there is no through-traffic, so wandering the streets after dinner is to feel as if you’ve been transported to some old seaport, someplace whale-rich and salt-sprayed. A good six hundred clicks from the Atlantic, that’s quite some trick.
The Virtual Tour
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The Gallery
The Floor Plans
