It's the Rightmove Roundup of summer dreams
and sullen madness. A hall of art in Hollywood, a chateau in France, an off-grid shack in the English woodlands! And which comedy podcaster lives in a London terrace like this?
ONE: 3 bed 3 bath detached house, 5163 Franklin Avenue, Los Angeles. $2,9m / £2.1m
As Lionel Richie almost sang:
“Oh oh oh what a feeling
When we're painting semi-nude tarot card people on the ceiling.”
But what fresh and exquisite heaven is this!
Nestled on Franklin Avenue at the foot of the Hollywood Hills - or the Los Feliz hills if we’re being specific but cmon it’s all the same hump of hillock - is this three bedroom casita of dreams. I used to live round there too (though I don’t like to go on about it) but I’ve never seen another house on that hump of hillock with a ceiling like this one, especially not painted over 1920s wooden beams.
Also, cannot get over the open staircase leading up to that mezzanine library, except - when is a mezzanine not a mezzanine? When it sexily leads straight into the rest of the house, mmmm.
The French artist who painted it and lives in it, Claire Tabouret, did an interview with Architectural Digest a few years ago. But now it’s for sale and I’m going to buy it, just as soon as my own tarot miracle happens. Just as soon as I pull out the cards that say oligarch and brief and painless marriage before his untimely yet generous passing. It’s any time now, lads. Any time at all.
Apparently the ceiling contains “a robed noblewoman, a falcon on her arm—the Nine of Pentacles. A kneeling nude, pouring liquid from two jugs onto water and land—the Star. A couple, the Lovers, split in two by what resembles a compass—the Wheel of Fortune.”
(Lovers split in two by a compass, you say? Something something insert dead oligarch here.)
TWO: Chateau in Uzès, France, 5 bedrooms + 10 hectares, £1.46m,
Let’s keep dreaming, for only the good Lord knows quite how dearly we all need our dreams these days. For under one and a half million quid - listed on French newspaper Le Figaro’s property website, which handily translates the prices as well as the words, is this “ wonderful property of 10 hectares with its very own castle, with origins going back to the 16th century.”
Le swoon, l’emergency, le let me lie down in that shallow green river of peace and swans and red shutters and not rise from it again until this cursed summer is over.
Le, I do actually speak decent French, why am I typing like this.
THREE: 5 bed Victorian townhouse, Victoria Park, London, £2.3m with Stag and Butler estate agents putting that annoying stag all over the photos
Or you could spend more than the LA house and more than the French chateau to live on a bus route in London. No but seriously, what sort of a comedy podcaster would go through hell doing up a beautiful house like this (while also doing up his other house) with builders everywhere, family dramas galore - and then put it on the market? This one, clearly.
Well all I can say is that this particular podcaster, who shall remain nameless, once told me how much he enjoyed my book The Hungover Games, so clearly the man is a genius, his wife has fabulous taste and someone should buy their stunning home immediately.
Also, I used to live just round the corner from here, and my cat Mitzi used to regularly go for a wander in their garden, so it’s touched by greatness in multiple ways. My cat Mitzi does not have a podcast that we know of, but she does go missing for up to three weeks at a time and sometimes we wonder if she might be recording something. A podcat, at least.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING 73% CHEAPER:
FOUR: 4-bed Victorian terrace off Gillygate, York, £600k.
Just to remind you of the absolute madness of our country, here’s a similar sort of house on a similar sort of street as the one above, except it’s in York and not London, it’s about a third smaller - and it’s 73% cheaper. Seventy-three percent! I’d very much like to live in this house myself:
Except, when I was at sixth-form college in York I had a boyfriend who lived on this very road, Portland Street. A bitchy girl in my class lived opposite him and I once told her that I could see into her house from my boyfriend’s flat. Next thing I knew, her mum had fitted some serious-looking wooden blinds to every single one of their windows. The girl said, “Yeah I told my mum you could see us and she said, ‘Ugh I do not want Sophie Heawood looking in through our windows.”
Decades later I remain unsure if my name was the guilty or merely arbitrary part of that sentence, but it certainly did seem to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. Would this mum have tolerated others looking in? Did she think, ‘F*cks sake, one day that 17-year-old c*nt’s going to write an online column where she peers into people’s houses on a pseudo-professional basis, I’m blocking her view while I can?” I mean, fair play if so.
FIVE: WRECK OF THE WEEK! Off Grid Cabin, 2 beds, Whittle Dene, Northumberland, £165k.
Well it’s a bit rude to call this a wreck, but then I am Sophie Heawood. The first thing I must say about this property is that the listing describes it as the “only available off grid log cabin in the UK.” How would they know?
The other thing that bothers me is buried somewhere further down the page, saying:“Tenure & Possession: The lease for the property is for sale, it is currently on a rolling 1 year lease. However the current occupiers are in negotiations to extend the lease term to 20 years.”
What do they mean? I’m uncertain. Because “offers over £165k” for a one-year lease would barely make sense in a luxurious apartment block in London, let alone a fairy glen in the woods outside Newcastle.
Still, you don’t have to pay any council tax on this property, it’s exempt from EHC regulations, and Whittle Dene nature reserve is thought to be home to so many woodland sprites that perhaps they’ll form an ancient ring of toadstools and bluebells to protect you from eviction.
THE END!
PS In case you missed it, get a squizz at Graham Norton’s house on the Thames here
I like the wide array of choices here. Something appealing about all of them except perhaps the woods. Solitude yes, creepy dudes in camo lurking in the undergrowth outside your window, less so.
FUN