123 Florence Street

A comprehensively renovated Balsam Grove home with three or four bedrooms, it's your call, three new bathrooms, a superb deck atop the double garage like something installed on a Mediterranean yacht, a garden ringed by towering cedars fit for a manor house, in-law suite potential, and some of the best refinished oak floors I have seen. It's a bewilderingly pretty, intensely bright, crisp mid-century house, with distant horizons and recent upgrades whichever way you turn. There is the sense you are in a gallery devoted to the house itself, which is some trick, but all those fresh white walls and that confident, modern air give the impression that maybe you needed a ticket to get in. There really should be reproductions of a house like this for sale at the Lego store. The appliances are all new, and the roof too, along with the eavestroughs and furnace. All the upgrades done so that you don't need to think about them. The lower level is completely finished and can be accessed through the attached garage. It would make smart living quarters for the gallery director, is my thought. A live-work sort of set-up. All of this in a part of the city convenient to the downtown core and the west end shops, as well as the Rideau Trail. There is a bus stop up near the corner that will run you wherever you need to be, not that you'll ever want to leave.