It's the celebrity special Rightmove Roundup

Rufus Wainwright in Laurel Canyon! Alan McGee in Primrose Hill! Quentin Blake in Hastings! Joan Didion finally selling in NYC after a whole year on the market and also being dead!

Good morning and welcome to this celebrity edition of the Rightmove Roundup, starting with a quick tutorial from Joe Lycett on how to artificially inflate the value of your house.

I almost don’t want to praise him, because the moody Victorian in me feels that Joe Lycett gets quite enough praise already - but come on, this method is nothing short of genius:

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Now on to the houses themselves, one of which is being sold by the musician Rufus Wainwright, in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles.

And I don’t know if I should tell this story but I wasn’t more than a couple of miles away from Laurel Canyon when it happened and it does seem relevant, although the language of it must be imagined with theatrical posturing and a strong desire to offend.

I was living in LA and had been asked to spend an afternoon in a high school, talking to the kids about what it’s like interviewing celebrities for a living. My friend Josh, who was then a teacher and is now a principal, had invited me and a couple of other ‘professionals’ to take part in this careers day. As I recall, the other speakers were a doctor who was on course to make a million dollars a year - or so she told the very impressed classroom full of kids - and a successful screenwriter / showrunner who has since made TV shows with the Obamas.

Sitting in between them was me, living on my freelance journalist overdraft and chatting away to the class about the time I interviewed Rufus Wainwright. How he had cheerily explained to me why he quit crystal meth, after his last ever meth binge had been spent, in his words not mine, “in a sex dungeon orgy raping a dwarf,” before he came to his senses and ran into the daylight forever more. Well, until he got to the end of the street and realised he’d left his wallet in the sex dungeon and had to go back and ask if they could just move that dildo so he could look for it.

I wanted to tell this story specifically because it was a good example of how not everything a celebrity says to you ends up going into the newspaper article, but it was at some point during this retelling that Josh also had to edit the material and ask me, quite urgently, to stop talking.

I looked up at the kids’ faces and they actually didn’t seem to be enjoying the tale in the way that I expected. Because they were children. And it was horrible. And I don’t know what is wrong with me, but honestly, something is.

On that bombshell: let’s look at the house!

ONE: It’s on for $2.2m with The Agency in LA (where Mauricio Umansky of Real Housewives fame works.)

It’s one of those witchy, twisty, fairytale houses that Los Angeles is so good at. But, like, a bad fairytale. In which, well, let’s just say the wide open mouth of this bear is not soothing my troubled mind. The bear, pictured below, seems to be roaring for help. And look at the dark wooden table legs beside it! What sort of beast is holding that table up and what sort of muzzle is it wearing? Did these guys all escape from the dungeon together en masse?

Another bear has been slain to go on the bed, and there are antlers on the ceiling above it. This house is a hunting lodge and I am afeared.

Then there’s this hatstand below, that looks like something from Hogwarts that would hurl the hat that determines your destiny at you on a good day, or curl its tentacles fatally around you on a bad one. I mean I’m glad Rufus changed his life and everything but I’m just wondering if the meth dungeon wouldn’t have been a better place for all of this.

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TWO: Alan McGee’s old house to rent in Berkley Grove, Primrose Hill, £17k pcm oh yes that’s seventeen grand a month!

Whenever I think about the Primrose Hill set [which is tragically often, as I live here now, here and in the 1990s, those are my twin towns] it always feels odd that Oasis were a part of it. I can totally understand the others, what with Sadie Frost having grown up around here, Jude Law being exactly the sort of handsome actor who rests his mirror on a mantel here, and Kate Moss being their best mate at the time. All of that lot make sense in an expensive London village of art and handbags and ice cream streets. But Oasis? Rancorous northern blokes who’d never cede vulnerability to prettiness?

Aaah but it all makes sense if you

remember that the much noisier Camden live music scene was just around the corner, with the Dublin Castle on Parkway mere moments from ver Hill, and that Alan McGee (who signed / discovered / managed Oasis) was already living right here in this massive house in the heart of Primrose Hill. Which is actually two separate houses, joined together with cocaine.

(From Wikipedia: “McGee's mid-1990s drug intake was such that he eventually suffered a breakdown. He has said he has no idea of the amounts of drugs he was using at this point, but that he cannot remember anything of the year 1993 other than the signing of Oasis.”)

And if there’s one thing I have seen young musicians who are unfamiliar with London do when they arrive on the music scene - I mean apart from blinding their own memories with substance abuse - it’s ‘become unduly influenced by the location of their manager’s house.’ Why else would so many bright young rebellious things end up in Chiswick?

Rumour has it that Alan McGee still owns this place. (Full disclosure, this is where I went to that bring-n-buy-n-botox sale the other day! Now I understand why the resident was selling off her own back catalogue!) So if the Oasis back catalogue isn’t paying him enough then let’s hope that the £17k a month in rent will help, the poor wee sausage.

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THREE: Quentin Blake’s old house in Hastings, Sussex, £950k

This is a four-bedroomed, two-bathroomed house on All Saints Street in Hastings, built around 1450 with some alterations from the 1600s and a 1920s kitchen. It was built as a Wealden Hall house and was home to the artist Quentin Blake for three decades from 1972 to 2022. Well, when he wasn’t in his other house in South Kensington or off receiving his légion d’honneur in France.

I spoke to someone familiar with the situation who was keen to stress that the way it’s done up now is not how Quentin did it. I think they meant the floral wallpapers and the novelty dog cushions etc, because the house itself is Grade 2 listed and can’t have changed all that much or there’d be hell to pay with the local planning officers. So we can all still happily imagine Sir Quentin crouching over one of these tables and drawing his cartoons of gangly limb people with ambulatory hip movements.

I do love Hastings Old Town with all my heart but bloody hell, it’s giving me a cricked neck just looking at all those low ceilings and enclosed spaces. No wonder Quentin Blake’s characters tend to walk with a stoop.

For about the same price, over in a different part of the Weald - the vast, ancient English forest that once stretched from Hampshire and Surrey over to Sussex and Kent - you can buy this detached house on Knightrider Street in Sandwich. Yes, I did just say the words Knightrider Street in Sandwich, and this is why the Americans will always lose.

And yet it’s off to America we go again, for:

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FOUR: Joan Didion’s 11-room apartment in NYC, $5 or $6 million?

Joan Didion’s longtime Upper East Side home, at 30 East 71st Street, has finally found a buyer. First it went on the market for $7.5m with Sothebys, then moved to a new agent reduced to $6.5m. Now, merely one year later, it’s gone under contract for we don’t know how much, after they staged it to look more like a contemporary home. Here’s one of the deathly boring staged bedrooms, not really giving off Joan vibes at all, but at least well suited to someone who is in fact dead:

And a staged living room that’s maybe but not entirely giving off Joan vibes either:

And a kids’ bedroom making me laugh out loud with its absolute Joan vibelessness:

Let’s just remind ourselves how maximalist Joan used to live:

“I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.”

And then there were the books!

Apparently the market for these pricey New York co-op apartments is not what it was, though, hence the discount. To those unfamiliar with the concept, co-ops are a particular kind of NYC apartment building which you have to apply to join. The other people on the co-op board get to decide if they want you in their building or not, so just offering a load of money is not enough. From what I’ve heard, it can all get quite judgemental and the co-op can continue to make your life difficult even after they’ve let you move in.

On the other hand, co-ops presumably also do a great job of preserving beautiful buildings and ensuring harmony for their residents. But is this true? Do YOU live in an NYC co-op? Tell us about it in the comments box below.

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FIVE: John Constable’s house, Well Walk, Hampstead, nearly £5m

Then there’s the painter John Constable’s house in Hampstead, London, up for grabs for some millions of pounds. God I’m bored of this millions of pounds things. All of the cultural history of our country belonging to the millions of poundses. I am hereby offering to buy this beautiful home for some rotting pears in a burlap sack, and it is a beautiful offer. They’d be deathless fools to turn me and my burlap sack down.

What I don’t understand is why the sales brochure for this property makes no mention of its blue plaque or its history as Constable’s home at all. Wouldn’t you show off about it? Wouldn’t you make clear to potential buyers that in this very house, after trying out various homes around Hampstead Heath, the Constables settled right here at 40 Well Walk in 1827?

Only for John’s beloved wife Maria to die of tuberculosis here in 1828, and for John to write to his brother that 'I shall never feel again as I have felt, the face of the World is totally changed to me.’

Oh.

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And then we’ve got the bloke from Mumford and Sons - we don’t think it’s the fascist-adjacent one or the Carey Mulligan one although they do all rather merge into each other - showing us his cider in this House and Garden article. It’s from September but for some reason just popped up on our timeline. Perhaps because it features this dazzling sentence:

“In an idyllic corner of Sussex, Milli Proust and Ted Dwane are pursuing their twin passions of floristry and cider making, growing their own cut flowers and apples in several meadows around their 17th-century cottage.”

What have these people got against the Industrial Revolution, is what I want to know.

THE END!

PS: I’m teaching a creative writing course with Rhik Samadder and Adam Shakinovsky at Villa Pia in Tuscany in late summer this year, look at it! COME!

https://villapia.com/the-writers-sanctuary/

xx