5088 Ramparts Road - SOLD

The Essentials

An architecturally fascinating bungalow on more than three acres, with a small creek. Just 30 minutes from downtown Kingston.

The Bigger Picture

An uncle moved to Australia when I was a kid, and lived a mysterious life on the other side of the planet. Second-hand stories of mundane derring-do made him an obscure sort of hero to me. There were simple tales of long desert drives in an open-topped jeep, thick yellow silt collecting on his face like a mask, or a hot riptide that pulled him around a headland and spit him out again on a private beach. A person willingly at war with his surroundings. He wrote letters home about flying squirrels, about bats that would in a single morning suck the life from a truck-load of mangoes.

One summer, I was about ten, he sent me a boomerang and I flung it furiously at the clouds gathered ominously over the field behind our house just outside Oxford. Occasionally, through some aerodynamic fluke, it would scream back at me at a thousand miles an hour and I would dive away from it and into the long grass. I remember the thud of the blade hitting dirt beside my head. It remains my closest scrape with physics and my own idiocy.

This house on Ramparts Road is another splendid boomerang, this one of wood and steel, glass and concrete, launched into the woods just north of Battersea, less than 30 minutes north of Kingston, and close to Loughborough Lake. Also, for the more literal-minded, it is an architecturally fascinating three-bedroom bungalow with over 2000 square feet of light-filled living space.

From the rather grand foyer, with its bracing mix of variegated slate and daunting geometry, to the vaulted main living space, with mile-off pine ceilings and a triangulated wall of windows over the ravine, and to the mountain-cool lower level with its walkout into the trees, this is a custom-built home unlike any we’ve seen before.

There is clear evidence at every joint and on every surface of a house both well-dreamed and expertly-made. Just seven years old, it is an energy-efficient and seriously impressive beast, with en-suite and skylight, seam steel roof and midnight granite counters, dual-flow toilets and low-flow fixtures; with both heat pump and woodstove, and an expanse of elevated deck along the front face that seems sometimes - and especially mid-night, with the milky way twisting solemnly in the sky above - like the becalmed deck of some ocean liner nosing into deep green water.