545 BAGOT ST - SOLD

The Essentials

A red-brick Inner Harbour townhouse with a stupidly pretty sunroom.

The Bigger Picture

This handsome end unit red-brick townhouse in the Inner Harbour is a block from the river and a ten-minute walk from The Screening Room. You could just about make it to either with your eyes closed. Same with The Elm Cafe and Pizza Monster, which are maybe a minute away. Daughters Grocery is on John St, and I’d be there most days. I tell you this to pin the house to the landscape, to situate it for you. The aerial photos further down the page do a better job, but I live nearby too and I love returning again and again to the list of reasons why.

None of this matters, of course, if you can’t bring yourself to leave the house. I’ve moved through these renovated and so-lovely rooms in recent days with a real reverence, as if I’ve stumbled upon a glowering secular chapel at the end of a hike through towering firs. Which is odd, given the distinctly urban setting, but there is, I swear, a serenity to this one, a sense of good energies lavished for more than a century.

I like particularly the angle of the south wall in the living and the dining room, the way the house widens towards the back, as if leading you into better understandings. I like the half step up into a kitchen that feels lifted from the Cotswolds, as does the skinny sunroom where you sit with your true love or your newspaper, or maybe alone and pondering the state of things, the back of your hand and the way the sun warms it, for instance, all the good fortune that makes that sensation and your awareness of it possible.

There used to be four bedrooms but one has been converted into a splendid laundry, with enough built-in storage to hide treasures. One of the remaining three has a mat set at the centre of the floor and the idea is that you sit there and meditate, I think, or contort yourself into shapes I haven’t managed in a decade. I’d wander instead, I think, taking in the new spa bathroom, the dark-framed windows and the sound of rain on the metal roof.

It occurs to me that I might build up into that attic somewhere down the road, just to access the view it would likely provide of the water, the swans in formation heading south from dark forest.

The Virtual Tour

Floor Plans



The Gallery