218 King Street, Saint John, N.B.
Asking price: $699,000
Taxes: $5,700.06 (2025)
Lot size: 4,101 square feet
Listing agents: Jake McVicar and Bob McVicar, Sutton Group Aurora Realty Ltd.
The backstory
There’s working to live and then living to work, and sometimes it just so happens that you get so good at working on the places where you live that it becomes your new line of work.
That’s the journey of Martin McNamara, who for almost 15 years has been living in and restoring one old (and sometimes historic) property after another between London, Montreal and now Saint John.
“I didn’t really fit into the normal 9-to-5 world,” said Mr. McNamara, who describes himself as someone with “no education,” not even a high-school diploma, who nevertheless found himself drawn to the challenge of restoring classic homes in between clerical day jobs.
“My first property was my grandparents’ house, which I bought with my mother,” he said. However, more than 20 years ago, they ended up selling the cottagelike home in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood to a developer, who replaced it and some others with a 60-unit condo project. “Part of what I do now is making up for that I had to sell my family home,” he said.
In 2011, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he took the equity from the Toronto house and purchased a Victorian flat in need of repairs at a London auction. After working nights and weekends to restore it, he realized he could make more money renting it out than he did at his 9-to-5 gigs.
Home of the week, Nov. 28: An Eden Smith house in pieces is gently stitched back together
Then he discovered another life hack for the penny-wise in London: canal boats, once part of cargo routes that spanned the country, that now dot the mostly abandoned urban canals.
“I found one that was really cheap, which freed me up to buy another property,” he said, ending up with a flat earning rental income, a canal boat and another restoration project in the coastal community of Hastings.
By 2019 he had stopped working office jobs and, during the pandemic, moved back to Canada to try restoring old homes in Montreal. That city wasn’t a great fit for his approach of bringing back a home’s original glory, since many of the properties had been gutted in the eighties and nineties. He was all ready to go back to Britain when he saw the listing for 218 King St., in Saint John.
“I stopped in my tracks. It was too interesting and too much of a one-off not to go for it,” he said. “What really attracted me about the house was how much hadn’t been changed. It was built in 1885, and not a single owner had painted a piece of wood or removed any walls.”
The stunning original woodwork on display in the foyer of the home.Jake McVicar/Jake McVikar
The house today
The house is one of several landmark homes that make up parts of walking or bus tours of the historic city centre. Mr. McNamara’s research suggests it was built by William Peters, a member of a wealthy family that also had a history of government roles in the province.
Jake McVicar/Jake McVikar
A mix of ornate brickwork and carved stone decorates the exterior, well above the standard of a typical Victorian home. A flight of stairs leaves about half the basement level above the street (common on the steep inclines of some streets here) and leads to a grand set of double doors.
“When people walk in – whether it’s friends or acquaintances – they say: ‘Wow, what is this?’” And the foyer does feel a bit like the lobby of a grand old family law firm or a boutique museum. “It has that level of grandeur,” Mr. McNamara said.
The ceilings on the main level are 14 feet high, and the doorways are framed with elaborate wood mouldings – some carved and angular with Greco-Roman influences, others with smooth sweeping arches. Panels of wainscotting climb up the grand staircase just ahead and down the hallway to the rear rooms.
Home of the Week, 218 King Street, Saint John, N.B.Jake McVicar/Jake McVikar
“Properties in the U.K., even the old buildings, can be quite cookie-cutter – a lot of row houses and terraces, every house is built the same,” Mr. McNamara said. “This house? There’s nothing to compare it to. Every room, every piece of wood, was custom-made for that house. They weren’t copying anything.”
To the left of the grand foyer is the front sitting room, with bay windows and a stone fireplace, which connects by pocket doors to a second salon that’s almost its mirror image, now used as a dining room.
Home of the Week, 218 King Street, Saint John, N.B.Jake McVicar/Jake McVikar
These rooms are almost period perfect, though one major set of renovations had to happen: The entire house had been wired with knob-and-tube. Removing that and replastering everywhere was a huge task.
“I do grunt work. All the dirty stuff, I’ll do. I’m not an electrician. I’m not a plumber. Once [those professionals] have done their thing, I’m back in doing the more basic stuff, finishing stuff, painting, plastering, some carpentry,” Mr. McNamara said.
On the back of the house is an addition that houses a more modern kitchen – with oak-panelled cabinets and brick-style tile floors, so it doesn’t look entirely like a 21st-century prosthesis – and a sunroom that looks onto the back garden.
The kitchen, in a more recent rear addition, keeps the heritage style with oak cupboards, wainscotting and brick-style tile.Jake McVicar/Jake McVikar
Upstairs, the ceilings are merely 11 feet high. Many of the original features remain, including oversized closets, one of which has been converted into an ensuite bath in the primary bedroom.
Jake McVicar/Jake McVikar
The shared bathroom on this level has tile work that Mr. McNamara dates to the 1930s or forties, so he copied some of that style in his new ensuite to keep the bathrooms in roughly the same style. There was a time when this house was owned by a railway company, and the generous bedrooms on this level were possibly a welcome retreat for visiting executives.
In the second of the two largest bedrooms on this floor is also the grill for a Victorian speaking tube that at one time was used to summon staff.
The lower dining room
The ornate basement dining room of the original house is now a comfortable lower living room.Jake McVicar/Jake McVikar
One area where the original owner departed from the fashion of the time was to put a large, ornate and sumptuous dining room on the basement level.
This room, with its high windows (more 11-foot ceilings) facing the street and mix of curved walls and straight lines in the wainscotting panels, is almost like a doll house blown to full scale. The finishes are a little warmer than those upstairs: Instead of stone, its fireplace is carved wood and brick, and a bespoke dining cabinet with glass display cases is built into a deep, arched cut-out of the wall.
“I often end up in the basement parlour,” Mr. McNamara said. “As nice as the upstairs rooms are, I feel small in them. They are not as cozy. They are impressive.”
He doesn’t even really want to sell this property, but he bought it because he heard developers were interested in chopping it up into apartments. Now, he thinks he has secured its future as a grand old home in a historic city.