108 Raglan Road

108 Raglan Road is one of my very favourites. A four-bedroom, two-bathroom detached red-brick home with good parking, just down the slope from McBurney's northern edge. A house that sits high above the street so as to pull in just a bit more sunlight than is standard. There is a very private courtyard out back that's rich with April birdsong, along with a splash of lawn where I'm told you sit and drink gin. Among the many highlights for me are: the front porch high above the street with its tiled floor, like the observation deck at some art deco skyscraper; the white walls and toffee floors; the splendid kitchen with its Thor stove and its quartz counters so cool to the touch, as if milk had been poured into a mould; the skylights upstairs, dropping all that light onto books. I'm also really taken by the way the fourth bedroom is hidden away at the back of the house rather than on the second floor. Install a kitchen in the basement below it and you've made something distinctly European, a separate two-storey suite like something that might open onto Hyde Park.