557 UNION ST - SOLD

The Essentials

A royal blue and rather glorious farmhouse perched above the harbour in Portsmouth Village.

The Bigger Picture

Yes, exactly. The Swift house is a royal blue and rather glorious century farmhouse perched on a hilltop above Portsmouth Village, just west of Kingston’s downtown core. I keep scanning that sentence. It’s not much to look at, that dozen-and-a-bit plain words, but at the same time, for me at least, it does a lot of the heavy work - it summons the right image, creates the right mood.

To elaborate a bit, I’ll add that some days, some seasons, you can see the waters of Lake Ontario down below you, hear sails wrapped tight and slapping at their masts, the aluminum clang of modern rigging.

There is the sense of a house that has been told to keep watch. It is a bright sentry, a painted bird set high in the trees.

I am taken by much about the house but start often with the blue ceramic tiles in the kitchen and breakfast area, and the way they lap up against the old pine floors just as water reaches a beach. Sea light floods in through every one of the marvellous new Marvin windows. Their black frames reinforces their awesome symmetry, they capture every vista as a crystalline image. They curate the world.

The kitchen, with its pine counters and its pot racks, its gas stove, feels plundered from the land’s best cottage, and gives onto a family room addition at the rear of the house that has been anchored to the world with a gas fireplace, and provides these decidedly rural-feeling views over the limestone patio and lilac gardens. There really ought to be a goat or two out there. A flugelhorn leaned against one of the sheds (a shed just begging to live its best life as as a studio).

The living room and formal dining room are nearly mirror images, one set each side of the front entrance. They seem to me (and I worry you won’t see this, that it’s a step too far) like upturned hands, a warm welcome crafted from timber and generous imagination.

To dash upstairs for a second, because sleep is important, the three good bedrooms include a large principal with walk-in closet.

It is, then, an utterly charming house, both elegant and comforting. It is a five minute walk, if that, to the water’s edge. I’d be down there all the time, or else wandering the village’s old alleys and walkways, all that land reclaimed a couple hundred years ago from the lake. But when there wasn’t time for that I’d just stand on the front lawn, ship’s captain for a day, and summon from that rare vantage point the transiting clouds, the sun itself.