79 Colborne Street

79 Colborne St is beautiful, of course, but not particularly glamorous. It is more glamorous-in-waiting, like the brilliant teenager slumming it in front of a Playstation console (in an old Lou Reed T-shirt). The colours don’t match (the third-floor loft is the colour of a London bus while the laundry nook is lined with the wildest Florida lime), and the flooring involves a looking-glass sort of checkerboard as well as thick coral shag-pile in a bedroom or two. It is a forgotten bag of liquorice all-sorts, a mixed load of laundry. Which is to say that you will likely fall in love immediately with this downtown townhouse, and then tease from it an altogether brilliant third act. The living and dining rooms are but high-ceilinged escorts to the fabulous staircase, its octagonal newel post like something plundered from a Victorian gambling den. There is a gas fireplace in the kitchen with the wingspan of Pavarotti, and beyond that a courtyard where you surely negotiate the end of wars, the start of an affair. You park your Bugatti back there, or the horses you had grazing all morning at McBurney Park. There are three bedrooms on the second floor and the loft can be a fourth, with its own ensuite, as if the plan all along was to both rise above the fray and ride out the apocalypse. I’d finish the basement too, and install a Churchillian pool table beneath sulphur beams, line the stone walls with mahogany humidors. You see where I’m going with this: 79 Colborne St is that oil painting the conservationist examines with cotton swabs and then returns with the news that you’ve bought yourself a Rembrandt. It is the perfectly designed magic trick; the handsome devil you nearly missed.