It's your very own Rightmove Roundup

Avec une grande maison that looks from France to Spain for under half a mill! A South London ballroom with 3 beds and roof garden! A round house! The cheapest bit of Southwold harbour! Hedgehogs!

I was in York the other day, where I come from, and visited a couple of old friends who’ve bought a 1930s semi, in a village with a river running through it. Previously lived in by an elderly widow who smoked like a chimney, this sweet but plain old house has now been stripped of its tobacco wallpaper, its bathroom of turquoise tragedy, and had a big sunny extension added to it. My friends have been sleeping in a caravan in the garden during all of this, cooking in a microwave in the garden shed and peeing in a Portaloo on the front driveway. But hurrah, dignity is now restored: to the building and its owners. With original tiles and doors all restored to their former glories too.

Oh and there are apple trees down the garden, and a gorgeous magnolia just waiting for spring outside the new kitchen, and land as far as the eye can see, fields all around them. Even though it’s only 15 minutes drive from the teeming global metropolis that is York town centre and its Christmas market. [Which is for you if you enjoy drinking a disposable cup of boiled Strongbow while Noddy Holder’s voice emerges from a row of untreated timber sheds all lined up as if waiting for dogs to piss on them.] [I love York!] [Just not when it is trying so hard to be York!] [It’s like watching a beautiful person cover themself in cakeloads of make-up in a confused attempt to be beautiful - York, you looked better before you turned yourself into a themepark, you ARE a Christmas fair, you don’t need the cider piss sheds.]

Then my friends, after answering all my questions about their new property, asked me what I was currently excited about.

So I gleefully told them about this ex-council flat in Primrose Hill that’s only on for £700,00, and it even has a balcony!

Even though I knew they’d only spent half of that on their entire - well anyway I carried on even more gleefully, explaining that yes this London flat is billed as a two-bed, but you can’t actually fit a double bed across the second bedroom cos it’s only 5’7 wide and the shortest of double beds you can buy is six feet, but, if you somehow wedged a double bed into the room, coming sort of longways from the window and then threw yourself onto it, like a torpedo sort of hurling yourself off to Bedfordshire at night, and if the freeholder Camden Council allowed you to double glaze the windows, at least on the inside, because they’ve only been single glazed since an architect designed them in the 1960s and are sadly falling to bits, but you might not be allowed, despite it being the ugliest building on the entire street by some margin, but yeah anyway it’s a complete BARGAIN.

And so I went on, and so I went on.

And my friends stared and stared. Not at the images of the leaking windows that I was bringing up on my phone. More, sort of, into my soul, as if the time had finally come to stage some kind of medical intervention. It was almost as if they wanted me to think that, for three quarters of a million pounds, you should be able to fit a bed into a bedroom?

Honestly. Bloody northerners.

ONE: Six bed house in Gers, Southwest France, €572k / £475k

Full disclosure: I’ve stayed in this lovely French house, but that’s why I wanted to feature it when I found out the owners were selling. They’ve been there for decades and would happily stay forever, but need to be closer to family now, so this is the absolutely perfect house to buy if you’d like to be further away from yours.

Oh but I jest - it’s a quick drive from Toulouse airport, and Easyjet exists, plus France has sickeningly affordable high speed rail. There is no escape. None.

Cette maison is a dignified place of faded grandeur, once belonging to some local bigwig who enjoyed his views of the Pyrenees immensely. You will have to share it though, as there’s nearly an acre of land that also houses a resident hedgehog who likes to “peek his sweet little face out of the long grass next to the vegetable patch.”

The house has a brilliant and highly useable kitchen from which the owner (a food writer) has run cookery courses, and there’s also a swimming pool, but it really doesn’t feel at all showy or intrusive when you’re there - more of an oh this old thing down the garden. In fact I swam in it when I was heavily pregnant, 13 years ago. Happy days.

All period features remain intact, which include: shouting at the people it loves and then retreating from life itself with a fist-clenching sense of futile despair - wait no those are my period features. The house’s features include stained glass panels in the doors, those gorgeous shutters on the windows and a big old curved banister from which to launch a thousand delicious liaisons dangereuses.

And let’s face it, there’s the price, which translates to roughly £475k for SIX BEDROOMS - about a third less than the London council flat where you could, alternatively, torpedo yourself into bed, narrowly avoiding a broken window.

TWO: 3 bed detached overpriced newbuild somewhere called Pottersbury I dont even know blah blah

Look this is really not a good house to feature, I just need you to bear with me for one minute

because everything looks quite normal for a while

Too bland for my liking but probably someone’s dream kitchen, can’t fault the size.

Oh look an ever so slightly strange… insect ornament? On the bedside table?

And a cow on the bedroom wall, fine

And some fish on the bathroom shelves

And a

wait what

But this is not the French hedgehog! Mais non, this one has taken up residence inside the house.

HELP.

THREE: 3 bed flat in The Old Ballroom, London SW9, £1.15m

Alright so I’ve already outed myself as someone with a strange idea of a London bargain, at least as far as Our Friends in the North are concerned - but this three bedroom flat in The Old Ballroom surely has to be one. It’s insane!

It’s 1800 sq ft, in a former Edwardian hotel in the Stockwell / Brixton area of South London, with meringue ceilings like princess dreams. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms AND a little roof garden: £1.15m for a shared freehold seems pretty reasonable to me.

And my daughter and I will be very happy here, and throw the funnest parties, and give it the life it deserves, just as soon as one of you generous benefactors sees sense enough to buy us it:

FOUR: One bedroom house, Highbury, London N5, £450k

Alright just give me ONE MORE CHANCE at proving to you that I can recognise a London bargain when I see one. How about this? It’s only £450k, which for a freehold, detached property in the desirable area of Highbury is an absolute steal and - can you tell what the catch is yet?

A distinct lack of right-angles, that’s it.

Funny how curved buildings always look so utterly desirable and classy on the outside, yet so prone to send your mind to the furthest reaches of its sanity when viewed from within:

And just the small matter of that kitchen cupboard with those dark marks on it, as if something either flooded or caught fire in that poky cooking corner? Did I mention the entire one-bedroom house is only 427 sq ft?

As for this bathroom photo below, it could be that a mirror is involved, hence the doubled image. Or maybe there really are twin bathrooms in this madhouse? It’s all gone a bit Jamiroquai video in my head, tbqh.

I mean, the floorplan alone is enough to send a person right over the edge:

Still, the listing describes this curvy little triangle as having been “featured in The Guardian and Evening Standard” as if that made it more desirable, even though I myself have also been featured in The Guardian and The Evening Standard, and I still seem to be available.

Maybe we should all have aimed for The Sun.

FIVE: 28-bedroom monastery, High Bradfield, Sheffield, £3m.

Alright back to the Grim North - but this really is so bleak that I can’t look at it for long. Just click here for more pics and understand that this is a Carmelite monastery, out where Sheffield turns into the Peak District, and “the buildings are situated within just under 18 acres of land where there are three hermitages and two cemeteries with the latter relating to benefactors and sisters” and they’re saying it would make “an ideal purchase for a Religious Organisation, Holiday Camp, Hotel and Spa, Wedding Venue” but all I can think is that it might be a nice place for all the middle-aged, middle-class ladies of a certain age to get away from Gregg Wallace.

Either that or there’s a grisly crime drama featuring Sarah Lancashire just waiting in the (angel’s) wings.

WRECK OF THE WEEK: £60k for a bit of Southwold harbour.

“This offers the unusual opportunity to take on a licence to occupy the whole mooring stage at Southwold Harbour. The mooring stage is 60ft in length, with a licence for one 60ft boat or two 30ft boats. The plot also benefits from two car parking spaces to the front of the stage.”

If all of that isn’t enticing enough - room for TWO CARS if you can’t fit your whole life into your sixty foot contraption - you’re going to be gutted when you realise what you missed on Thursday:

That’s all folks - see you for some more overpriced tat and glory next time!