136 Ordnance Street

136 Ordnance St is a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath semi-detached brick century home a half-block from McBurney Park. It's been painted a rich cream, and comes across in morning's haze as slightly soft-edged, almost as if packed with goose down. At the same time it feels rigorously built, something whipped up in an advanced geometry class, a composition of perfect rectangles and ninety-degree angles. How tall can we make this box, how distant the back wall? The stylish wood stove set in the front room means that you can rest, whenever you want, in a mountaintop ski chalet. Further back, in the kitchen, there are far-off tin ceilings, dovetailed solid cabinets, and black concrete counters, as if a hundredweight of liquorice had been pressed into oil- and knife-resistant slabs. There's the Miele gas stove lifted from a Michelin star restaurant and yet also so sleek it must be something that hasn't quite been invented yet. The elevated deck and the secluded stone patio offer a supercut of Downtown Urban. There are two bedrooms upstairs, but the landing is an office, an art space, there is more than enough real estate there that a third bedroom could be built over a long weekend. There is a walk-in closet and second-floor laundry, a clawfoot tub in the main bathroom that feels distinctly film-set. It makes you want to laugh, it really does, in that astonished sort of way you might laugh when your lottery numbers come up.