It's a Rightmove Roundup of utter madness

Featuring a guest post by Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun! (The film's on Netflix and oh you might sob like I sobbed.)

Mar 30, 2025

Roll up roll up for Greek island bohemians, Dubai bajillionaires, the winning of the Euromillions and remote Scottish islands who want YOU.

ONE: One bed apartment that is quite possibly imaginary, Dubai, £160m

Well thank God that’s over as it had been really stressing me out. I am talking, naturally, about the Euromillions rollover, which had been going on for so many weeks that the jackpot had swollen to £202m, its highest ever prize, until some poor sod in Austria won it on Friday night.

Every time I thought about what I was going to do with the winnings - I was forced to keep entering, I don’t make the rules - my belly was getting queasier. I mean, you win £1m and you buy a house, obviously. Loads of houses in the UK cost a million quid now so that’s not even going to set you apart from everyone you’ve ever met. Your life will carry on. Win five million, you buy a house in Primrose Hill. Ten mill, a house in Primrose Hill, one in Devon and one on the Greek island of Hydra. Like I say, these are just the rules as they stand and I can’t be held responsible if you don’t like them.

But £202 MILLION. I would have had to think about others! In fact I’d have had to set up a charitable foundation that would give grants to other charities, a capital fund that would earn enough interest that the core 200 mill would last forever. I wouldn’t even be spending the money. I’d be investing it in emerging markets and only creaming off the topsoil for my acts of largesse. And then, rather than hand over to any number of capable financial directors, I’d have to bloody well run it myself, as the thought of the scandal when it turned out the staff were defrauding the fund and I hadn’t noticed for years because of my hands-off attitude - oh I could see the headlines about me already and they weren’t pretty.

No, I thought with a sigh, I’m going to have to become an accountant if I win two hundred million. That’s not freedom, that’s a millstone around your neck for the rest of time. It was getting to me.

But while I was down there in the doldrums I did have a quick look at what I could have bought myself with that kind of budget and I must say, this luxury apartment in Dubai really came out on top.

Particularly as the Rightmove international listing describes it as a “one bedroom detached house,” which it is clearly not. Lads, you had one job.

Detached from reality, maybe. Has it even been built, or are those images entirely AI?

Still, let’s now inspect the flat that costs more than the GDP of a Pacific island nation and may or may not exist.

I bet it’s lovely inside.

Oh look there’s a little shop!

God, you’d be in the little shop all night, wouldn’t you, trying to spend your remaining 40 million quid on human contact and Pringles.

Wait where did this pool come from? And why is there a fishing boat in it?

Oh I see - this complex doesn’t just offer a kidney-shaped pool.

We’re going more for the full dialysis machine here:

Do you remember in Mad Men, when Don Draper went to hang out with the beatniks of Greenwich Village and they asked him, because he worked in advertising, how he slept at night?

And he replied, “On a bed made of money.”

I think this next picture is an AI artist’s impression of a bed made of money.

Money that is beige. Dubeige. Money that tastes of teeth whitener and a horizon as flatscreen as the telly.

What was it that Lana Del Rey sang?

“You took my sadness out of context
At the Dubeige Apartment Complex”

Wake up in the morning in your beige made of money, stretch your arms yawningly aloft like someone in a Tom Hanks film, and walk onto your sunny balcony to begin your day.

Your Groundhog Goes To Dubai Day.

To be repeated the next, and the next, doing nothing, being nothing, until you have defeated the concepts of both time and space and entered the Dubai Luxury Apartment Continuum, over and over, like a monkey with a miniature cymbal.

Never forgetting your Precariously Perched Croissant:

Oh, but Precariously Perched Croissant. How I preferred your early work. Those acoustic gigs at the Dublin Castle circa 1986.

TWO: 3 bed house in Papay, Orkney, £515 rent per month.

And now for something completely different. I’m delighted to say that Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun - a book whose beauty and profundity is matched only by the film starring Saoirse Ronan - is a fan of the Rightmove Roundup for its beauty and profundity too. She used to live in Papay, not far from this house - which isn’t hard because the island is four miles long and one mile wide.

As the book/film describes, Amy lived there while in recovery from London alcoholism and feeling lonely, to work as a bird observer, and more recently when she took her partner and kids to live and attend nursery / school there for a period. The island has under 100 residents, a number they are excited to increase.

Perhaps not for the faint-hearted, though.

This community-owned house has come up for rent for £515 per month. It has three bedrooms, wooden floors and views much like those from the Dubeige luxury apartment complex, only completely and utterly different. It’s considerably cheaper too.

Amy says this!

“Papay is a special island with beautiful beaches, coastline, abundant birdlife and a tightknit small community not found in many places. The primary school and nursery gives kids lots of attention and different experiences and the island is particularly looking for families with young children to keep the school running. Papay life could be suitable for people who can work remotely from home or are willing to pick up part time work on the island. There’s a huge amount to be gained from the freedom and fresh air of small island life - but it’s also a big commitment and a lot you have to go without in terms of amenities and entertainments. I think new residents would need to be self-motivated and capable.”

Or, for a similar but slightly more glamorous opportunity, another Scottish island called Eilean Shona is looking for a couple to come and work and live there over the summer. Eilean Shona is more of a private holiday resort, though, with a lovely instagram, lots of holiday cottages, no cars.

THREE: 3 bed villa on Greek island of Hydra, 2m Euros.

Speaking of islands with no cars - here’s my favourite one, Hydra. Aaahh.

Now you might be looking at these villa photos and thinking well that’s all very fun and looks like a fine sort of place for a man with a moustache or indeed a woman with a moustache to pick up a brush and paint their desires as naked as the mood takes them - but isn’t it a bit wonky to cost 2m Euros?

Welcome, my friend, to the island of Hydra.

All the property there is very expensive, despite not being overtly ‘luxury’ but rather more artistic and rustic and chill, which is why I like it so much. Well, not the prices, but the vibe.

Leonard Cohen used to live there, wrote several of his best songs there, fell in love with Marianne there, and Polly Samson wrote an ace novel about all that. It’s set in 1960s bohemian Hydra and called A Theatre for Dreamers.

But most of the action of Hydra happens in Hydra Town, where the houses are all clustered together, whereas this villa is down the long coastal path towards Mandraki, (there are no real roads or cars in Hydra), out past the Slaughterhouse, which is the Deste Art Foundation gallery and home to the most fabulous launch parties every June.

In the photo below, I think the house is near that final bend where you can see the white boat. Oh and the big gold sun was made by Jeff Koons, who’s been coming to Hydra since the 1980s and who is also the highest paid living artist in the world, which might help explain the sort of affluence we’re discussing here.

And back at the house, you’ve got almost your own private steps into the sea:

FOUR: 3 bed, 4 bath (bloody Americans), Hollywood Hills, $2m.

Or you could take that same 2m euros/ dollars and spend it on a similarly white villa in the Hollywood Hills. I realise the higher reaches of Los Angeles have not seemed like the safest real estate bet in recent times, and let’s not talk about the small matter of insurance, but heck this is a fantasy.

My God, the garden:

Your future Hollywood Hills home can be found at 2025 Pinehurst Road, CA 90068, because American real estate listings always come with the full address, which we Brits find odd. Although it actually makes a lot more sense than not putting the full address. The odd ones are surely us.

Which reminds me: I got an email from an old friend across the Atlantic this week, and she basically just wrote, “Everything is going great in America!” It did make me laugh. Until I wept.

FIVE: Arty live work opportunity in the town square, Wincanton, Somerset, £750k

I’ve been here! I was interviewing Lynne Franks for a very entertaining commission the Observer kindly gave me. Lynne runs a business just across the road and brought me in here to meet the lovely couple who were running ‘Bootmakers’ as an art workshop that later sprouted a pizza takeaway. They lived above the shop - the whole building is amazing!

And now it’s up for sale, with the owners promising they’ll teach the new owner how to make pizzas if they want to carry on the business too. A creative, sociable and entrepreneurial family could have a really fantastic life here: