The Sophist goes on delicious Rightmove for you

and finds a glass madhouse inside Highgate Cemetery, plus Timothee Chalamet's new pad in Beverly Hills and a private island

1) Wonky Granny house near Kings Cross, £1.5m

Reader, I have been looking around, and let me tell you, there is too much perfection out there. Too much tarting up of houses into fifty shades of greige and marble countertops and shiny surfaces that reflect nothing but your own meagre attempts at a personality back at you, every time you look down into the abyss that is your engineered wood floor aesthetic.

We need less aesthetic. 

We need houses where the living room is overcrowded with 14 armchairs that smell of Granny’s teeth, and baked-in urine, and Savlon. We need carpets that used to be magenta and green, but that was two monarchs ago, and now they look as threadbare as Liz Truss’s calendar of speaking engagements. Houses where there is a nice framed landscape leaning against the wall that is going to be hung up soon, really, next time anyone sees the hammer, a promise that has maintained itself since 1982 and has now collated generational dust on the dust children of its dust.

Reader, I have found one such house, or a small example of the possibility of such a house. A house that hints at being such a house if it had a bit more room. And it is right in the middle of London, so near that you could stroll to Kings Cross if you so chose! 

Even though nobody would so choose, because that any walk to Kings Cross from any direction surrounding it is horrible, because Kings Cross Station is an island of useful in the sea of horrible, and don’t tell me about the new Coal Drops Yard development behind it, I’ve been there, I’ve seen the stylish vendors of lifelessly non-branded branded apparel, I’ve eaten the burrito that tastes only of Wednesdays, all of your Wednesdays, all your loves that didn’t end because they didn’t begin, all your small midweek deaths. 

And while it is very nice that my friends at The Guardian can now walk across the road from their offices and buy a top from And Other Stories that has a capped sleeve design that goes in a direction one centimetre different from the other eight capped-sleeve tops they have previously bought at And Other Stories, just to feel something, I remain unmoved. 

But look at this tiny house! It’s been on for some weeks and nobody is buying it, because one and a half million pounds for just over 700 square feet and a wonky living room wall is, even for central London, un peu trop, especially when it’s only got two bedrooms, a solitary loo, and a galley kitchen the size of one medium servant. But still, the number of armchairs in that lopsided living room is a good start, and Parker Knoll is an aesthetic we must get behind while there is a generation alive who can still buy it.

What have we here, a piano with the sheet music for, if you squint, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square on it? Ahhh, good old London.

This house is in fact called The Cottage and is the jewel at the heart of the Lloyd Baker estate in Clerkenwell, a collection of Georgian and Victorian properties built on land once belonging to one of the seven bishops who was sent to the Tower for treason in 1688, but which became a spa resort with the Fleet River (now underground) and the slopes of the Fleet Valley in the 1750s. A spa resort! Near Kings Cross! Roll that into your lifestyle burrito with sour cream and sadness on top.

By the 1820s they were building houses with lovely flourishes like this one, with Grecian pediments, and radius windows like you see here, that gorgeous arch. The Cottage is available on the open market for the first time now! Oh go on somebody buy it and let me come round and sniff the chairs for grandparental wee. I miss that fragrance of temps perdu.

2) That big glass one in Highgate Cemetery, £7m, now with added elephant!

Oh lordy lord it’s this one. That glass madhouse in Highgate Cemetery, well technically it’s on Swains Lane but it appears to sit right in the graveyard, overlooking the burial sites of Beryl Bainbridge and Lucian Freud and Karl Marx and that funny graphic design tombstone that Patrick Caulfield made for himself. (Did you know they buried the electromagnetics scientist Michael Faraday and his wife Sarah in the ‘Dissenters’ section? Just tell me what I have to do in this godforsaken town to be assured a plot in the Dissenters section. Ideally not involving electromagnetics.)

This house was designed by the architects Eldridge Smerin, whose name was surely intended for a Simpsons character, to replace a 1970s house by the modernist architect John Winter who had got to this plot first. Now I believe Winter’s own ‘Winter House’ still stands next door, but this replacement one built by Elfin Smegma is a jaggedy angular glass thing with a decorated elephant in the window. Last sold for under £4.5m in 2012, now on for £7m. Look!

And the decorated elephant of Highgate looks out of its window and it sees the land described by the novelist Audrey Niffenegger, who set one of her books here, as “a high-walled secret garden of death”.

But what else is inside the house?

I’ll tell you what else is inside the house, to keep the decorated elephant company, perhaps put there by Elvish Spermwhale themselves.

Daleks.

And a cinema, as shaded as death.

And a bedroom right down there beside the dead

And a photo of the house, while you are inside the house. Bit meta.

And a grand piano to play midnight lullabies and soothe all the lost souls out there back to their deep and righteous sleep. (Dissenters, I am looking at you. Enviously.)

3) Timothee Chalamet’s new house in Beverly Hills

Yes, the little man with the French name has bought this house off Kate Upton, the American model for Sports Illustrated Swimwear. A publication that should be rewarded for its public services to the birth rate, given its prominence in the cubicles where straight men make their contributions to IVF treatment. Those who prefer twinks can have pictures of Timmy Chalamet. This house has it all!

Although these photos are from when Kate bought it, so we don’t know what it looks like now or what he’s going to do with it. Still, at least we have a GQ cover profile of him from 20120 to verify how Timmy has, previously, felt about houses.

‘He rented the house in Woodstock so that he could have a little space all to himself. He craved the privacy to try things and to fuck up. To make small mistakes now, out of view, when it was just him, when he was still young, so that he didn't have to worry about it later. At one point, he stood up and slapped an empty water bottle off the table so that it clattered against the screen of the porch. “I want to know what that sounds like!” he shouted.’

This journalism. It’s incredible. And there’s more.

‘He got to practice his guitar and harmonica in peace, cook himself his “shitty pasta” without judgment, permit himself space to keep growing up. So much was in the spotlight now. But in that cabin, he could sit on the couch for a while and re-familiarize himself with “the crease in the cushion” that he'd lost touch with over the past few years. The quiet. The stillness. That sunlight there coming through the trees. He could breathe a little. Sleep a little. It had all been so good for him so far. But the goodness made him anxious. When will the other shoe drop? Not there.’

Well we’ve all seen Call Me By Your Name so the crease in the cushion is just peachy but I do hope his other shoe, his shitty pasta, his shitty shoe in the crease of his other pasta cushion, will be very happy here, dropping into this swimming pool.

But if he wants something in LA a bit more rustic, how about Rustic Canyon?

4. Shangri-La in Rustic Canyon, LA, $3.5m

“The home was originally built as a one-room house by a pioneer, high on the hillside in 1924. In the 1930s Brett Weston purchased it installing a dark room for his father, Edward Weston the world famous photographer. The house was enlarged and improved in the 1960s and then again by the current owners. This treehouse evokes a Northern California atmosphere and has influenced the artists who have resided there. The house offers two, or potential up to four bedrooms, two of which are currently used as a wood workshop and separate art studio.”

Three and a half million, sort of has bedrooms, BUT WAIT TIL YOU SEE THE LAVATORY

Wasn’t that a nice lavatory?

Anyway this email is now longer than a Dominic Cummings blog post about civil service megastructure so I must stop here, check back in next week! Maybe I’ll write a proper column again! That won’t crash your browser with all these bloody jpegs, will it.

Oh go on then here’s number 5, it’s the Isle of Vaila, a private island in Shetland, only £1.75m for 750 acres including a mansion, farmhouse, cottage and YOUR DESTINY.