It's the Rightmove roundup number whatever, counting is for the weak.

Featuring a manor house for £290k, a French chateau for half a mill and a dubious shagpad in Greece.

Yes baby we’re back. Back and never leaving you again. If you’re a paying subscriber, your payments have been on pause (thanks to the beauty of the Substack system), and if you’re an annual payer, your year will carry on for longer than 12 months. Isn’t that clever? We are enormously, deeply grateful for you. And like I said, we’re never leaving you for this long again. WE LOVE THIS MAILOUT!

So, onwards. Because I just read this description of going to a magical house in the Hollywood Hills and it speaks to me, oh it speaks to me.

“I felt a spasm of joy in a little spare bedroom he had down the hall — it was a tiny room, and in it was an enormous canopy bed made of gold-plated brass, the metalwork of which curved upward at the posts to support a gigantic golden crown in the center. This was set off by an old red silk-velvet bedspread which looked like it came from some glamorous vampire movie from the 1930’s.  I wanted to move in there and drink blood out of crystal champagne flutes.”

But on to the houses currently for sale!

1) French chateau near the Loire Valley for £500k

Just a smol chateau, reasonably sized, seems to come with a separate tower. For about half a million English quids! (580k Euros).

It stands majestically in the heart of France, so the blurb says, where the regions of Burgundy and Auvergne meet the Loire Valley. Various kings have taken shelter in this smol chateau, its construction having begun in the 13th century, but somehow it has not yet featured in World of Interiors.

Probably because it doesn’t belong to a disaffected Norwegian painter (who was once married to a Guinness) (before inheriting an Argentinian polo farm in the divorce settlement but losing it in a poker game with a tramp) (before buying up a disused Milanese envelope factory where the wind whistles ever so slightly fascistically through the steel window frames.)

Is there no justice anywhere?

Anyway this pauvre chateau that advertises itself as being “an ideal site for artists and artisans” - well two of my friends have already had a Facebook disagreement about it.

Friend 1 said that, while the post-Brexit paperwork for us Brits is a mess, it can still be done, so he wants to buy such a French place as this, with a collective of friends, and split the cost ten ways. Split the yearly maintenance costs among the ten people, each of whom receives a private bedroom and a workspace. Build or convert the outhouses into high end cabins and make money from glamping, retreats, courses etc.

Friend 2 said well that sounds like a waking hellscape.

Friend 2 continued, imagine chasing everyone for their contributions, all the disagreements, you should just cover it all yourself as the maintenance might not be as bad as you think. If the building has been there for 700 years already, it will last 700 more, as long as you respect its traditional building methods and allow it to breathe.

(At this point my ears pricked up in their argument, as I am obsessed with lime render, and the fact that old houses only get damp because we foolishly repoint them with modern cement, a material so impermeable that any moisture in the walls is forced to congregate in the bricks itself! Which is an excellent way to create damp patches! Moisture is normal and it was always meant to pass through the mortar! Impermeable materials are terrible for old houses, they really do need to breathe! See me for a four hour and semi-accurate lecture on this subject, in which I will get much of the exact terminology wrong.)

Friend 1 said oh come on, all old buildings get damp, they always need work, and if you don’t warm them up in winter they fall apart.

Anyway, the happy news is that Friend 1 and 2 then both heartily agreed that there will be a reason this place hasn’t sold, and it’s probably fucked.

Oh.

2) House of the evil bear, Hackney, London, £1.45m

Well I remember when the high street near this house was known as Murder Mile, due to gangsters and gunfights. Now it’s one and a half million quid for a terraced house about four million miles from any kind of tube. Still, lovely red paintwork, you think. Shall we look inside?

Ooh it’s a proper untouched nana house, with a bed in the dining room and washing-up on the sink. It looks a bit like someone left in a hurry. Or in a hearse.

But then you see him! And once you see him, you cannot unsee him. Seated there on the table in the centre of the sitting room, in the centre of the street, in the centre of history. Look at him. Look at BIG TED. He will kill again.

Now my own family household is dominated by teddies, so I know their type, their biscuit-trafficking ways. Their hearts are idle; their paws are kind. This bear, however, is working towards other goals.

Don’t be fooled by the presence of Little Ted on his lap, if you can zoom in that far, nor by the red lovehearts on his paws. Why is the house even on the market? I think we know why. How many lives have already been lost? And now that Big Ted has the taste for blood, how many more will be slain?

Murder Mile is back, and this time it’s run by the bruins.

3. Six-bedroomed house in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, £1.15m with Inigo

Yes it’s this entire building, right on the high street in Bexhill - that extra front door on the left is a fake! Phew! Even though I sometimes wonder what I would actually do with a six-bedroomed house, but then the thought quickly makes itself scarce, as I jot down in my Notes app that I would take in lovers (who could probably do shifts staying in just one bedroom with alternate weeks off), and refugees (who could make their home in a couple of bedrooms and the rest of the house until they’re all sorted) and maybe I’ll have a sewing room and an art studio as well, for lounging in a visually beguiling manner.

In this loungement fantasy I am a hugely benevolent and sexual person who has forgotten she actually has a family of her own yet has somehow learned how to sew. I cook stews with my Riverford veg box. There is no guilt associated with my vegetables, because they do not rot. They are a source of light and comestible wonder. They can almost fly.

If you think I don’t genuinely write these fantasies down in Notes, at some length, it is you who is the mad one.

Look at my kitchen! Look at my cupboard of stairs! God, is there anything more enticing than a cupboard of stairs? (NB this may not be the precise architectural terminology.) But if I ever write a murder mystery I think a cupboard of stairs will have to be involved. Or perhaps one of my jealous lovers will kill me on this very one here. House of jealous lovers! What a great sentence; someone should write a song called that.

4. Two bedroom flat in a communal manor house in Yorkshire, £290k.
   SORRRY WHAT! WHAT! There has to be a catch.

   

   
   Oh dear God - here’s the solution to everything! You can live in a massive stunning manor house that looks like something from The Bible of British Taste and you don’t even have to be married to A N Wilson. You don’t even need loads of money, and the bluebell wood comes for gratis. Think of the instagram opportunities for three to six weeks of the year!
   

   

   

   
   The catch is that you’re going to share it with some other people, and it’s in Rotherham, and yes I do have to say that while growing up elsewhere in Yorkshire, I was not led to understand that one could find splendour in Rotherham, or even in a field that’s halfway to Sheffield, as this actually is, (bit close to the motorway too), but!
   
   Here my Facebook friends can solve their argument about how to divvy up the chateau. Someone has already divvied up Chateau De La Rotherham, which is actually called Thundercliffe Grange. Which I think is the title you get if you ask ChatGPT to write a new Brontë novel. And it’s near enough to their homeland that you could move here and actually become the next Brontë yourself. As long as it’s Branwell.

   All the jealous lovers you need are surely already installed!
   God, imagine the arguments.
   
   It even has a GYM, a communal games room with a snooker table, and communal stables for all your communal horses. I know you have many.

5) Zorba’s house in Kardamyli, Peloponnese, Greece, 275k Euros (about £250k).

It’s Zorba’s house in Greece! Or is it? We don’t actually think it is. What with Zorba being a fictional character, and the book ‘Zorba the Greek’ being set on the island of Crete, while this house is in mainland Greece.

But still. You’ve got to admire the marketing! Which says something about the author Kazantzakis having lived near here while he was writing the book, except it goes on to say he was actually living in a cave, beside the waves, but anyway, look at that view.

Also do you really want Zorba’s house? I mean, there’s a bit in that book where he has a one-night stand with a beautiful, passionate widow, after which I seem to remember she gets stoned to death by the wrathful villagers?

I’m not sure this is the kind of ‘taking a lover’ option we’re looking for here. But those wooden beams seem extremely well fitted to me, which is perhaps more important than sex. Beautiful house, thanks. We’ll take five.

See you next week!