750 PORTSMOUTH AVENUE - SOLD

The Essentials

A really pretty and really interesting five-bedroom, two-bathroom detached midtown home backing onto Balsam Grove, with in-law potential on the ground floor. Those are the essentials, the facts that will drive you to the pictures and then maybe the tour, the map, and finally to the phone for a showing appointment. It’s a gracious family home where you can give the teenagers their own wing or, with the introduction of a galley kitchen, help out in a handsome way with the mortgage.

The other way of seeing the house is as an investment property. The proper five bedrooms is rare in itself, and one of them could be carved off in straightforward fashion and made part of a self-contained in-law suite. A bus runs right past the door to St Lawrence College, and Queen’s University’s west campus.

The Bigger Picture

The usual way of describing a house is to start at the front door and work your way deeper - create a sort of virtual tour in words, letting your imagination fill in the gaps. ​And I can see the rationale. But with 750 Portsmouth Avenue the urge, I've got to tell you, is to rush pell-mell upstairs and then promptly leap, rather like a musketeer making an entrance, down the three steps into what we've set up as a grand primary bedroom, with its walk-in closet bigger than some apartments I've lived in, as well as an imposing fireplace at the northern end of the room, and a wall of windows that looks out over The Hundred Acre Wood (or a mighty fine impersonation of it anyway). It's a cork-floored marvel, is what it is, even if I'd be tempted to use it as an elevated family room (or ballroom) rather than sleeping quarters, a gathering place surely trucked in from an Adirondack lodge. Maybe it's the cooler weather around the corner but I picture a lot of plaid, and some hipster leaning all lumberjack-y against the fireplace mantel, twisting both ends of a glorious, ridiculous 'stache. And I mean that in the best possible way. I do. It's a movie scene up there, a beer commercial, it's "home", only writ so much warmer, and so much larger than life.

You get to repurpose that room if you like, because there are four other bedrooms in the house, three on the second floor and one downstairs. It's a big house, in other words, with the potential to make an impressive in-law suite on the ground floor. The separate entrance is already there, as well as a tiled bathroom with a sunken tub big enough for a Bond villain. You'd slide a galley kitchen in next to the back door and away you go.

The east end living room gives onto the dining room and the kitchen, but also offers sliding doors out to a pale blue deck the size of PEI, and a garden ... (well we talked about that - the Hundred Acre Wood, etc etc).

You're aching to get to the pictures, I'm sure, or to dawdle in the house a while courtesy of the virtual tour. I'd recommend that move a lot and so I'll shut up. You don't need me making all the standard gestures here. I'll just say that I like these images very much. You might notice that the lighting is predominantly natural in these images, and there is less of a real estate feeling to the place. It feels an evolution of the art form to me, more truth in advertising and more art in commerce.

You thought you’d seen the last of me. But a quick word about the market, which has changed an awful lot the last six months. 750 Portsmouth would have listed a good bit higher in the spring, and buses would have dropped hordes of out-of-town buyers at the door. It would have taken hours, days maybe, to wade through the offers. Afterwards it would have seemed there was an explosion at the newsagents'. The fact that it's not remotely like that any more (and I'm more than okay with that) means there is a real opportunity here. A home like this just doesn't come along very often. And you add that in-law potential to the mix, the sprawling gardens, the hardwood floors, and all that for well under $600,000, and you have a value that I really believe will survive the roiling markets and prove a smart investment.