5 Alamein Drive - SOLD
The Essentials
An extraordinary house on a great street. A corner lot facing the park. Five bedrooms plus an office and a gym. Any offers to be reviewed on Wednesday May 26.
The Bigger Picture
You build this same house down on Alwington, nearer the lake, and you can at least double the price. Hell, you move it just two short blocks onto College and you’re still nudging a million, easy. You haul it onto Churchill or Hill St and you’re at 1.2. You see where I’m going with this: it’s to your enormous good fortune that the house is actually located on a pie-shaped lot on Alamein Drive just one block west of Helen St and facing the tall trees of Elder Park.
And to be clear, Alamein Drive is one of our favourite streets. Its location should add to its value. Every one of you should pack a sandwich and sit middle of that park one day this weekend, just to take in the birdsong, and the kids’ laughter, the sound of bicycle wheels doing laps around the park. This week someone had a kite out there and was steering it expertly between the trees. I could hear its tail snapping against the wind. A Limestone Dairy box on someone’s front step caught the light and it was like I’d been transported in a flash to somewhere just slightly better.
A secret being whispered is about as loud as it gets on Alamein. It’s a wonder they don’t charge admission. And it’s picturesque, with all those saltbox cottages other side of the trees, and it’s convenient to the downtown core, as well as to the lakeshore, the university and the hospitals, and ten minutes in your car gets you to the west end for all the big-box store shenanigans. The only thing you’re giving up is the price tag of anything more than about twelve feet to the east. Real estate is weird.
The house itself really is quite extraordinary. It’s a back split, I suppose. Well it is; it just doesn’t quite feel like that. A two-bedroom bungalow has had a two-storey addition discreetly, handsomely, added to the back of it, with three more bedrooms and a finished basement that reads more like a Hollywood screening room. The result is a grand sort of residence full of light and wonderful flow. Pacing from the front door to the back deck takes about thirty-five minutes. There are over 2400 square feet of luxuriously finished space above grade and then there’s that basement, with its rec room, and its office and gym (you could even have two more bedrooms down there). It’s as if you won some lottery and now live within a couple dozen pages of Dwell Magazine.
The photographs tell the story quite eloquently here. All these soothing spaces dressed up in their finest whites. It’s a house that’s off to a royal wedding. And you should take the tour. I tend not to have time for those. I rely on a quick glance (first impressions are important). But a slow waltz here is a fine reward for your efforts. End on the back deck, maybe. We’ll meet you there.
*
The Realtor.ca details are here. (Or will be any minute)
