6189 BATTERSEA ROAD - $715,000
The Essentials
A gorgeous rammed earth home twenty minutes north and a million miles from ordinary. One of my very favourites. Ever.
The Bigger Picture
I’ve known for well over a year that 6189 Battersea Road was likely on its way to market. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve thought about it most days since then.
Whenever I’ve had reason to drive past the house, the temptation is to pull over and marvel one more time at its perfect geometries, its tidal patternings. I’ve imagined buying it myself so I can sit quietly and every morning dead-centre of what feels like a post-modern refuge, a Dwell cover story, a life ambition realized. Often in that reverie I have a favourite book in hand (an old volume of Ondaatje’s poetry maybe, in which he writes about this same landscape, just a few miles west), or a glass of something very cold. But mostly I’m just soaking it all in. I remember twenty years ago or so sitting atop a hill in the Lake District looking down over a stone village bathed in a watery northern sun. I didn’t think I’d ever equal that sensation, but I swear there is something about the property set among verdant lawn and midnight cliff that is every bit as unearthly, as transporting.
It’s a rammed earth house, which perhaps you knew from your first glance at the pictures: the illusion of a sand beach stood on end like a painting. I assume you’ll be googling like mad as soon as you’ve worked through the sublime virtual tour, so I won’t go to great lengths here, except to say that the technique has been commonplace for centuries (which is about how long your house will last, remaining cool in summer and warm in winter). The walls, incidentally, are two feet thick, which matches the area’s best limestone farmhouses. The only difference here is that this house is never going to let the rain in.
Heat is provided by a four-zone in-floor radiant hot water system and the floors on the main level are concrete. There is an HRV to regulate humidity levels and a state-of-the-art water filtration system. There are German windows and doors so substantial that when you lever them open or closed they feel lifted from some metropolitan art gallery. The metal roof wraps the vaulted pine-clad ceilings like a space-age raincoat. Utility costs last year averaged $172 per month.
There is a bedroom and bathroom, as well as laundry, tucked at one end of the main floor and the loft above makes for a presidential sort of hideaway (with an ensuite Richard Branson wanted for his island, is what I hear, so grand is it beneath the stars, so ocean-deep is its tub). I would deliver speeches from the loft’s balcony, I swear, wax poetic for hours on how architecture done right can change a person’s life.
The lot is a completely fenced and entirely awesome two acres. There is drainage beneath the undulating lawns and a dark, soft-edged cliff off in the corner that comes across like a giant’s pillow set against an emerald blanket. When we walked the property a couple of weekends ago, it felt we might be at some artisanal seaside vineyard. And when we made it back to the patio and surveyed silently the wilderness to the north (the neighbour, by the way, is open to the idea of selling you another couple of acres for the pony, the holiday hide and seeks) I half-expected a grassy Chardonnay to have been set quietly at my elbow.
There is a shipping container parked outside, and that’s yours, the free gift with purchase. You’ll store the patio furniture in there come winter, that’s my guess, as well as the bicycles and the camping gear, the unpublished novels.
I haven’t even mentioned the post and beam, the induction stove and other assorted high-end appliances, the mile of quartz counter you lean on to contemplate the acreage. Or the way the floor plan makes so much sense it must surely be sentient, a smart evolution and distillation of all interior design ideas. Or how the ceilings are so far away you lay on the couch and the knots in the pine are like stars in the night sky, and every drifting thought is like high gauzy cloud.
I could go on, but I know you need time alone now with the iGuide tour. Phone me when you’re done, why don’t you? We can talk about how one might go about expanding the house if there were suddenly more of you living out there. We can talk about energy efficiencies and the possibility of taking things right off-grid, about geology and geography, about escape and communion. About whatever it is you want most in life, starting, of course, with this house itself.
The Virtual Tour
The Gallery
