It's the hungover Rightmove Roundup

In which the popstar Benny Blanco makes his pool the exact same temperature as baby piss.

There’s bugger all on Rightmove at the moment, even though people always say the biggest day for looking at it is Boxing Day - presumably for the same reason that divorce is most popular in January. But is it literally the same people, wondering whether they they could still afford a spare bedroom if they left their husband?

As someone who has always looked rather suspiciously at marriage I’m now wondering if I should start a separate consultancy service for these wanderers. In which I find them properties within their budget, say something convincing about up-and-coming areas, throw in a bit of legal advice based on random titbits my divorced friends have told me while drunk, and then just rabbit on about how great it is not being betrothed.

I’m not sure any of this is necessary though, because all you need to do is look at the following video and life will suddenly seem full of renewed vigour and possibility:

I mean, how the hell did I miss it? Benny Blanco, a popstar who means nothing to me, is the love of my life after watching this. It’s a tour of his house in Los Angeles from May 2024 and every time you think you’ve seen the best bit, it gets better.

Like the double shower which he likes to share with his friend Dave, even though Dave’s going to kill him for telling us. The bench made entirely out of teddy polar bears. The candy room where he guzzles Skittles he thinks might kill him and where he stays watching films for “two to seven business days.” The cellar that his friend was injured by accidentally rolling into. The pool.

“You know when you went into a baby pool where it was just filled with piss? That’s exactly the temperature I like to keep this pool at.” I’ve never seen anything so joyful on Architectural Digest in all my life.

(Photos by Jenna Peffley)

(Also now just obsessed with being invited to one of Benny Blanco’s parties so reading this NYT article about them from 2022.)

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(Photos by Brent Darby)

Now it’s quite a leap from pure Hollywood dayglo fun into an austere cottage in Wales, but this house was House and Garden magazine’s most popular property of 2024, so let’s have a look. I’m not saying I read every single word in the article - look I have a hangover - but I glimpsed bits like “Dorian rebuilt the oak seating complete with end scroll as a reproduction of a piece held by St Fagan’s Museum” which I think tells me all I need to know, ie, we’re sticking with the pictures.

Which mainly seem to involve tools made before the Industrial Revolution and benches designed for pigs. I’m sorry but if you have to actually hide your broadband router, and I refuse to believe they haven’t had to hide their broadband router, then you’re not so much living there as cos-playing as a peasant, which is quite some kink, but each to their own.

(Speaking of which, I myself went out the other night wearing a beige cardigan with neat gold trim, a beige skirt, a waxed Barbour jacket and boots, and I mean it did look good - but I had to apologise to the very leftwing vegetarian hosts when I realised that I’d turned up to a birthday party cos-playing as a shires Tory. )

Anyway, this Welsh cottage: sorry, but if it’s not Benny Blanco cooking pizza for all his pool friends in a pizza oven which says BLANCO on it, either before or after one of his friends accidentally rolls into the cellar, it’s dead to me.

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Now THIS is more like it and I shall be referencing it in my new property consultancy in which I encourage people to leave their spouse: Vanessa Branson, sister of the more famous Richard, shows my dear friend Eva Wiseman around her house and talks her through her mad art collection:

(Photos by Sophia Spring)

Which is funny because I once went to the hotel Vanessa owns in Marrakesh and came away with some art myself. I mean I bought it in the hotel shop, I didn’t steal it from the rooms, I wasn’t even staying there, I was staying in the cheap package deal place around the corner, and I’d only gone out for a very quick walk to photograph the sunset, and then I had to explain to my child why I’d come back with a painting under my arm having said that we couldn’t afford to keep buying ice creams, so I didn’t explain, I smuggled it into our room and smuggled it into my suitcase, in which it didn’t fit, so that was a mess, and then when we got back to London my daughter asked why I had been hiding that stupid thing so badly for three days, and the whole experience reminded me of the time she found some cigarettes in my handbag and I got very embarrassed and told her I was looking after them for a friend - but I digress.

One piece of Vanessa’s home art collection is a pot made by Grayson Perry, and this is where divorce comes into it:

“I commissioned it from him after my husband left. It’s a monument to the midlife crisis.” Perched on its lid is a gold masturbating ape. “I’d seen someone had an urn for their ashes as a reminder of their mortality, and Grayson asked, ‘What’s going on in your life?’ I told him and he said, ‘Leave it to me.’” She grins.

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Now if you’re still worried about growing old and lonely, here is a 90-year-old who seems to be having a colourful time of things. Betti Franceschi is curating a two-bedroom museum of her own life, according to the NYTimes:

As far as Betti Franceschi is concerned, every last part of her apartment is alive.

“I’m an animist,” she said, referring to her sense that there’s a soul in everything, including inanimate objects. “And anyone who’s not — I don’t understand it.”

The 90-year-old artist has lived in her Upper West Side rental since 1990, and she’s accumulated a lot of life in the place.

Ms. Franceschi did get married and have children — a son and a daughter — and she moved to New York to continue making art. Once the marriage was over and the kids were older, she was still making art.

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I haven’t put any sales listing in this time because everything’s very quiet but I did just spot this rather devastating little cottage in Dartington, Totnes, Devon, for £200k, which could help with the running away from your marriage sitch?

You get almost 14 acres (including bluebell woods!), a stream, a disused quarry and this timber cabin. I mean wtf? This is paradise? And I was going to say it still doesn’t have Benny Bianco’s pizza oven but it DOES appear to have one that says Pizza Hut on it so you know, game over:

Just look at the picture above - not only a very small branch of Pizza Hut but also a sofa in the rafters for taking your pizza and sitting out the arguments when your former partner comes after you having found out your new address.

I’m sorry, I’m taking this divorce fantasy a little far now.

BUT IS MARRIAGE WORTH MORE THAN HAVING YOUR OWN BLUEBELL WOOD WITH A SUSPICIOUS GREY CABLE RUNNING THROUGH IT?

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Last but not least, we’ve got “Scots dad furious after £270k newbuild house has Costa coffee cup sticking out of wall,” one of those stories that turns me into a patriotic Brit like nothing else. Look upon our work ye mighty and despair.

More houses for sale the next time someone actually tries to sell one xxxx