It's the Rightmove Roundup of houses I can't quite believe exist.

A seafront apartment in Amalfi, a £3m grey triangle in Highgate, hippy Hebden Bridge for under £250k and Wes Anderson's future bungalow! Plus the artist Alice Neel's place on the Upper West Side, NYC.

1) Paranoid grey triangle near Highgate, £3.2m

You know what it’s like when you spend £3 million on a paranoid grey triangle - oh come on, we’ve all done it - and you sit there afterwards, slumped on the floor like a penguin and his portfolio, wondering which edge to lean your furniture against, or which wedge of wall to hide a window behind, or which grey floor to lie down on and quietly die.

The listing says this house has six bedrooms, but four of them are lies and the other two are waiting to be found out. I searched for them on the floorplan but all I could see was the time the sister in Fleabag got her hair cut like a pencil.

Meanwhile, the garden fences provide a bobsleigh track for pigeons, while the lawn boasts a sheer drop just in case you have any children you need to eliminate from your life.

To be fair, there is also a roof garden, although it’s not so much a green space as a nature vaccine, where you may enjoy 20 minutes of fresh air before being recalled to your triangular cell to mourn how many right angles you took for granted in your old life.

Any buyer will surely lie in bed at night trying to rid themself of bourgeois neuroses such as ‘knowing which way my house faces’ or ‘understanding why my garden resembles an outdoor challenge on the Crystal Maze, but for ferrets’ or ‘appreciating why all the neighbours on my street stand and laugh at me as I pass.’

Or wondering how old the house needs to be before it learns the truth about its birth.

That it is, in fact, not a house in its own right, but an extension of another, older house: the one next door. Who wasn’t able to keep it and raise it as its own flesh and blood, because it hates it, absolutely loathes it, and says it looks like a complete twat.

2) Two-bed flat with incredible views, Camden, London, £1.05m

Now this is more like it, North London! A third of the price of the triangle and look at the view! As flats go, this is a decent size: over a thousand square feet, two bedrooms and two bathrooms, big living area that goes around corners, vast light. It’s in a busy part of London, just off Camden High Street, but it’s the penthouse of a former office building so sits aloft all the drama, preferring not to comment (while silently judging.)

The secret joy of this location is that, as well as the grimy urban skagfest that is Camden Town, you can walk to Regents Park to see its rewilding project in a few minutes, Primrose Hill in a couple more, or down into Soho in well under half an hour if your legs are shapely. I know this because I live near here too, and my legs are absolutely lush.

There’s also a sort of communal roof garden on the way into the flat where I think - and I have not tested this theory - that you might be best off letting your hypothetical cat out to play. Unless you want to release it onto the perimeter balcony, which might be quite exciting for the cat. Less so for the person watching.

Of course the problem is that it’s on with The Modern House, an estate agent whose photos are designed to dope you into a dream state in which you believe the lifestyle is included free with the property. All these paintings, all these objets d’art, all these vintage desks will be mine, I tell myself! I will live here and become an aesthete of clarity and confidence, with an eye for the spaces between the things! I will write the Great North London Blog Post sitting at that window, my subscription numbers dancing in the waxen light.

Whereas in fact I am writing this in my pyjamas at half past two in the afternoon, surrounded by damp laundry on collapsed clothes horses, having just eaten a curry flavoured packet of Super Noodles and wondered how many Curly Girl Method videos I’ll have to watch before my hair stops looking like straw.

3) Two-bed seaside apartment in Amalfi, Italy, €1.2m or £1.03m

How it has come to be September I am uncertain - what kind of a summer was that? I do not know, or wish to know, but let’s escape to our coastal hideaway in Amalfi and pretend it never happened. Now this bit of the Med is the former seat of a powerful maritime republic which I reckon could be brought back to life if I was allowed to simply sit on my arse and stare at it for long enough. The terrace alone is about 850 sq ft - that’s bigger than my current flat.

Il apartamento is on the third floor with no lift, but as I say, you’d not be going anywhere once you’d got your shopping up those stairs and struck a pose on the magnifico terrazzo, as the Italian listing describes the outdoors. There are two bedrooms, two bathrooms, healthy quantities of Majolica ceramics and a load of bright colours which may or may not relate to someone’s nonna getting high on limoncello while they were doing the decorating.

And it is a joyful thing and I hope the person who owns it will be as happy as I would have been if life had granted me with a bright orange Mediterranean pot to piss in.

4) Two-bedroom end terrace house, Hebden Bridge, £250k.

For an absolute palate cleanser after all those million quid price tags, here’s a house in West Yorkshire with a lovely garden, asking £250k. Which is actually quite a lot for Hebden Bridge, and the house is rather small (no woodchip on the wall), but after all of that London business it’s like heaven on a canal. The garden!

The kitchen!

The rest of it!

As I have mentioned before, Hebden has long been known as an LGBT-friendly corner of the country, and it’s got a thriving writers’ community as well as TV shows like Happy Valley and The Gallows Pole (made by Shane Meadows) being shot there.

Amy Liptrot, Ben Myers, Adelle Stripe, Zaffar Kunial and Horatio Clare are all local authors doing brilliant stuff. You’ve got The Trades Club for gigs, a Picture House cinema and loads of parents organising outdoors forest schooling and other such alternative education for their kids. If my own mother hadn’t so frequently reminded me that the Calder Valley was dark and gloomy - and yes perhaps it does have a slight issue with suicide rates and addiction - I might have moved there myself.

But no, I decided to stay in a town where they try to flog you paranoid grey triangles for three million quid. Some days I think I made the right decision.

Today is not one of them.

5) Three-bed bungalow, The Old Village, Huntington, York, £425k

Of course what my mother would really like is if I moved back to our hometown of York, where I could raise my child in this bungalow and we could all stand very still while Wes Anderson created the ultimate northern masterpiece around us.

We’d sit in a line on this sofa and say bleakly intriguing things while staring straight into the screen. Nobody would reply.

In the kitchen, one of us would gaze into the fridge, wondering why a small gun was stored in there, before closing the door again. Making sure to stand to our full height slowly, as if a spirit level were resting on our head.

The doorbell would ring; Tilda Swinton and Bill Murray would be waiting. They’d have come to see my mother about her taxidermied squirrel collection. The one she took illegally from New Orleans in 1966.

Mother would retire to her bedroom and say she didn’t know anything about any squirrels and would have to lie down. This endless summer heat.

Afterwards, once Billy Murray and Tilda Swinton had gone, each of those wooden cupboard doors would open to reveal a stuffed squirrel, dancing as slowly as a ballerina in a box.

We’d be happy here and good God I love that green hallway carpet. But Huntington? I’m sorry but that side of York is deeply alien to me and therefore highly suspicious. Practically foreign. Like going abroad! My apologies to Mr Anderson but it’s simply too far from the bit where the A64 meets the A19.

LINKS:

Beautiful houses written about elsewhere:

Luke Edward Hall and Duncan Campbell on how they decorated the incredible cottage they rent on a Cotswolds estate.

Doomed politician Rudy Giuliani is having to sell his glitzy Manhattan apartment.

Natalie Imbruglia’s house on a private island in the Thames is up for sale.

And the artist Alice Neel’s apartment on the Upper West Side of NYC remains almost exactly as she left it. Heavenly.