House of the Week: $4.45 million for a rustic vacation home on 50 acres in Rural King

House of the Week: $4.45 million for a rustic vacation home on 50 acres in Rural King

The 1,800-square-foot escape comes with four bedrooms, antique appliances, a 20-foot-tall great room and a barn

Neighbourhood: Rural King
Agent: Khalen Meredith and Kim Nichols, Sotheby’s International Realty
Price: $4,450,000
Size: 1,811 square feet plus a 759-square-foot barn
Bedrooms: 4 plus a loft
Bathrooms:
1


The place

A five-bed, one-bath home in Rural King, just off Weston Road. The property consists of a main house, an attached garage and a separate barn sitting on about 50 acres of land, all of which backs onto the Goldie Feldman Nature Reserve trail network. It’s a 10-minute drive from the shops and amenities of Aurora, Schomberg and King City and roughly 45 minutes from downtown Toronto.

The history

This house was built as a retreat in the 1930s by a family from Forest Hill. It was meant to evoke a classic log cabin with a post-and-beam interior. Like many homes in the area, this one is surrounded by trees and accessed via a long, winding driveway to maximize privacy. Avril Lavigne used to live up the street.

The tour

This is technically the back porch, but it’s used as the main entrance.

Here’s the view from the porch, which the realtors say is terrific for scoping out the local fauna, including hummingbirds, blue jays and deer.

The porch opens to the great room, which stretches the full height of the house: close to 20 feet.

The great room’s stone fireplace once heated the whole home. The owners have since installed a propane furnace with forced air heating plus a generator.

Another view of the great room highlights its exposed beams with pine interior walls. In decades past, the owners would push the furniture to the margins to host dance parties.

There are many spaces surrounding the great room. First up is this pantry with plenty of cupboards.

Past the pantry is this galley kitchen. That wood-burning stove is original to the home, although it’s mostly used as a work surface now. The wall behind it is brick.

Here’s a close-up of the antique stove and its detailed metalwork.

A reverse view of the kitchen reveals a second pantry with a fridge and more storage.

There are four bedrooms on the main floor, each with hidden cupboards built into the panelling. This is the main one, with a picture window.

The second bedroom takes up a corner. If you squint, you can see the contours of the secret cabinet to the left of the window, above the bed.

Here’s the third bedroom.

And here’s the fourth bedroom, with multiple built-in closets.

The bathroom comes with a toilet, tub and sink.

Here’s the staircase leading to the upper level. There’s a built-in display cabinet at the foot of the stairs.

The upper level has a loft for guests, with vaulted ceilings. You can see the brickwork from the chimney behind the beds.

Here’s the front of the property. The doors lead into a mudroom and an entrance to the unfinished stone basement, respectively.

The attached garage fits two cars but is currently used to store equipment for the in-ground pool, which was added to the lot in the 1970s.

The barn may be the property’s most charming feature. It has 14-foot ceilings and a concrete floor. It will need some renovating but could eventually be used as a studio, a home office or a separate residence.

Much of the property is forested, with about 10 acres of open space.


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