The Sophist

The Sophist

The Rightmove roundup!

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?

Jul 11, 2025
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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.

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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.

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