560 Albert St - SOLD

The Essentials

An adorable two-bedroom cottage (or is it three?) at the head of Albert St. Turn right and walk right onto the university campus. Left and you’re at the Memorial Centre, with its farmers’ market, splash pad and dog park.

The Bigger Picture

I’ve already described one house this morning as a cottage and here I am doing it again. It’s like I’ve been transported back to the country outside Oxford where I grew up. And like I’m young again. Well, almost.

My grandparents lived in a stone cottage in Church Enstone, in west Oxfordshire. The walls were a yard thick and the house was built into a hillside. The roofs were low and there were vegetable gardens out back. There were two hunting dogs that sprawled in front of a fireplace that took up most of one wall. The house smelled of dog and dirt. My grandfather used to sit at the very edge of the old flowered couch watching wrestling on the TV. His pants were hiked halfway up his shins. He thought the cheap theatre being broadcast was very real and he bobbed and weaved like an asthmatic boxer. My grandmother meanwhile hunched over a brilliant old farmhouse sink rinsing lettuce. I dreaded every visit.

None of the above is true of 56 Albert St. Except maybe the kitchen sink, which belongs in a farmhouse and is deep enough you’ll surely lose track of the dishes. The house here, unlike that one shrouded in tattered memory, is bright and sharp and welcoming. The ceilings are high and the stuccoed exterior belongs on a postcard. The bathroom (it’s on the main floor) is large enough to get lost in, and the floors are heated. You need a map to navigate the walk-in shower. There is a separate dining room that is presently being used a third bedroom (and why not?) and there is a mud room at the back of the house that is more than big enough for your bikes. The garden is private and feels … old, if that makes any sense, as if lilacs were planted a century ago to make the world come across just a little sweeter. The two bedrooms are built into the roofline, so the angles are dramatic, like those in an Expressionist film, but there is surprisingly good head height.

You’re at the northern end of Albert St, and the Memorial Centre at your doorstep has been revitalized to the extent that it is unrecognizable from the dilapidated spot it was a decade ago. Sunday mornings now, a parade comes up from the McBurney neighbourhood, everyone keen on the bread and the pierogis, the cider and the dumplings, that are laid out on ice or on scorching grills (though you may have to step over and around all the yoga enthusiasts in their Lululemon, their ridgebacks and their snoodles leashed to the closest tree). You’re living through a moment of great change in other words, and who in their right minds wouldn’t want to do that?

The Virtual Tour

The Gallery