The Sophist: It's the Rightmove Roundup!

Some ridiculous houses to pore over. Absurdly good. Should be illegal; probably are. But is Drake really going to spend 10 mil in HACKNEY?

ARTY BOHO PARADISE WITH A POOL, MENORCA, €1.65m

Let’s get straight to it - here’s a delicious house in Menorca, the smaller Balearic island that doesn’t have to bother being Mallorca or Ibiza and just gets to sit there and chill in the middle of the Mediterranean sea like a smug little bastard. Look at this house! My eyes. If I lived here I would rise in the morning for a dip in my surprisingly cold swimming pool, before breakfasting on almond blossom and self-righteousness on my shaded terrace. I would then summon profound artistic inspiration from the lushness of the bougainvillea and start my day’s posting on social media, making sure to caption my lifestyle with endless endearing hashtags such as #natureunplugged and #naturalliving and #ecolifebabe, before recharging all my devices and checking my user engagement stats 43 times, before drinking my seventh cheeky vino and crying down the phone to my divorce lawyer, before falling into the pool, before realising the pool now feels strangely warm, urine, mine.

THE OLD DEFENSIBLE BARRACKS, WALES, £500k

Then there are the Old Defensible Barracks in Pembroke Dock, which I would always choose over the Old Indefensible Barracks, as you’d have a harder time being friends with them on Twitter. (That isn’t actually very funny, is it, and yet I typed it, deleted it, then typed it all over again.) The Rightmove listing for these barracks says NEW HOME, before explaining that this moated fortress was built, to protect the Welsh coastline from assault, in the 1840s. I suppose it is a new home, conceptually, as nobody has lived here for such a long time -oh hang on it says there’s a tenant stuck there in a leasehold apartment who you’ll have to contend with, and that - oh my God - famous former residents of the barracks include Arthur Lowe, who played Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army!

DON’T PANIC CAPTAIN MAINWARING! We’re coming with a property development consortium of ageing DJs who are so bored with sobriety that they’ve brainwaved themselves into plunging what’s left of their NFT and crypto losses into dodgy refurbs. We’ll convert your mad old military quarters into a weekend resort full of media grifters who need to consume a public arrangement of mid-morning eggs just to feel something. Because mid-morning eggs have really gone the full wankerdom haven’t they - I should know, it’s 11:17am and I’ve just ordered some in Gails, my grandchildren don’t need an inheritance, here, take all my money in exchange for the lifeless spawn of a hen with added rock salt.

Anyway this place is only on for half a million. £500k for a 20-sided stone fort! Naturally, restoration costs might tip the grand total nearer to eleventy zillion, but we’ll cross that drawbridge when we get pissed and fall off it.

THE HOUSE THAT GAK BUILT, HACKNEY, £10M.

Look, I’ve lived in East London for twenty-five years so any talk of gentrification and being priced out has to begin with the fact that I have priced people out in my time too. I can’t complain about the new prices without acknowledging my own role in the old ones.

THAT BEING SAID.

This house.

Ten million pounds!

FFS! There’s a homeless guy living in a tent right across the road!

The local rumour, which might be a joke, is that this double-fronted Georgian villa on Navarino Road, London Fields, has just been sold to Drake. Yep, Drake, the moody popstar who funded the second series of Top Boy, the undeniably brilliant East London drama series. He even came to its launch at the nearby Hackney Empire, so it’s just possible that he does need a local hangout. But is he willing to pay 10 mil for a double-fronted Georgian that has been violated restored by a bloke who launched various boozy bars and diners and venues in the area, after first removing refurbing those venues’ souls? Said bloke, whose 20something daughter was on Made in Chelsea and posts Tik Tok videos from this very house, has now done the same to what could have been a lovely old period property. Instead, it has become The House That Gak Built.

Oh look, the most obvious black Crittall doors used throughout, tick. A wooden and perspex staircase designed by a snail on ketamine? Tick. A blue sitting room with the most expensive looking deep blue walls, and then a white door that appears to have fallen off the back of a conservatory in Romford? Big fat tick. Surely the interior designer’s moodboard was just screengrabs of Adam Levine sexting his vibe to Instagram models.

There’s even some kind of sacrificial arch in the garden, which could also just be a ruined Turkish bbq. Then there’s the indoor swimming pool! Which features a very, very, very small basketball net on the wall, which is surely the feature that persuaded Drake to part with his cash. All to protect his perfectly manicured hands.

Drake who once sang that he bought his mum an expensive house to cheer her up and so now she feels lonely on the better side of town, nope, can’t see any connection here in the house that gak built.

It’s not actually called that by the way - I’m just toying with the idea of getting sued.

WRECK OF THE WEEK! A FINCA IN FORMENTERA

But back to the subject of very small Balearic islands that are not Ibiza or Mallorca, because I do love to support an underdog: here’s a lovely ruined finca on Formentera, that tiny isle of flat white sands where Ibizans like to go for lunch by boat. It’s a dilapidated farmhouse that could potentially have eight functioning bedrooms but currently merely has some draughty chambers, a man with a red sweater strolling around and a woman dressed in black lurking in the background. This fearsome widow has surely chosen to remain abandoned here, left to the four winds and her crumbling Gods.

Except there seems to be some mistake in this underdog narrative, for the property is listed at the price of TWO MILLION European quids, which means that either Fearsome Widow is about to become richer than her Crumbling Gods, or Red Sweater Man is about to shaft Fearsome Widow, or Fearsome Widow is about to poison Red Sweater Man, or all of the above. If you are a TV commissioning exec, please note that I would watch the shit out of this six-part drama, which will start with a momentary hint of them muttering broodily in Catalan but then just inexplicably switch into English for the rest of the series.