64 Wellington St is a rather brilliant and vanishingly rare duplex (circa 1841, stucco over brick) situated across City Park from the university, and just up the street from Lake Ontario. The renovations are marvelous, the appliances high-end, and the garden an oasis. There is ample parking, abundant character, and nothing left to do or to worry about. It is perfect, it seems to me, as a downtown pied à terre with the added benefit of upstair’s income. The two one-bedroom units both feature solid-wood custom kitchens and exposed brickwork and clawfoot tubs. It is hard to choose between them, but if I lived there myself, I would write at a drafting table set middle of the room beyond the ground-floor kitchen, staring wistfully out at the interlocking brick patio, trying to unravel in words its dappled shade. I would write better sentences, I know I would. I would also sleep better than I ever have too, at the back of the house and far from the madding crowd, in that pine-ceilinged bedroom with the garden wrapped around it like a quilt. The parlour at the front of the house belongs in a magazine, or that Hardy novel you’ve been meaning to re-read. Some will view the property less romantically, perhaps installing their children, one above the other, while they’re at Queen’s, giving them every possible advantage. And fair enough, there are all sorts of futures possible here. (id:24093)