The Sophist's Rightmove roundup

It's the houses of your dreams! Also nightmares.

1) BIG ARTY PALACE BESIDE THE THAMES, £16.5m

16 and a half million quiddles for a palace on Chiswick Mall, the best street in west London, right in front of that mad little uninhabited island the Chiswick Eyot, why certainly Madam! I shall pay in cash with this nice little windfall I recently obtained from shorting the pound! Friends in low places, you know!

Although what’s this I see - my new crashpad, Walpole House, appears to have some art on the wall? Made from twigs? Again? Next to a billiard table that has mistaken itself for a daybed in a tuberculosis sanatorium, wheel me out into the garden and get the pleural fluid off my lungs, what? 

Ah but I do favour this proud little golden piggle beside my new desk, actually quite fun, reminds me of a party I once went to with David “Dave” Cameron in a barn.

Nice garden, contains a sundial, could use that in a ritualistic summoning of my ancestors to apologise for crimes currently being committed against their statues. All that topiary’s looking a bit shabby though. Garden needs its own hedge fund.

And then there’s the rather adventurous pouffe in the blue bedroom, perched on the floor there beside the fireplace. Is it art? Or just three gallstones staging a sit-in protest after being removed from a warm and cosy rental opportunity in someone’s liver?

According to the Savills website, Thackeray was educated in this house beside the river, back when it was a boarding school. Inspiring him to create Miss Pinkerton’s Academy in Vanity Fair. Of course what Savills might not know, out there in their luxury property division, is that Thackeray took the name Vanity Fair from the story in the Pilgrims Progress about man's sinful attachment to worldly things.

Vanity, the awful town with the fair, the trading place where they worship false gods and throw you in a cage if you don’t love greed like they do. How this correlates to my brand new 16 million quid house full of vital organs and twigs I’m not entirely sure, but that’s ok because nothing has to mean anything any more! The symbol is completely detached from the symbolised! Let’s all f*ck a pig!

2 THE CLOCK HOUSE IN HASTINGS, £2.5m

This place has got such strong Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen vibes that I’m worried he’s going to pop out from under one of these angel-of-death-sex-party beds at any minute, swishing his own fur around. Especially since he just told the Guardian that he feels ‘quite cross that evolution denied me a foxy tail.’

The Clock House was built in 1828 by Decimus Burton, in the Gothic revival style. Ol D.B., as literally nobody called him, was in fact responsible for the whole splendid infrastructure of St Leonards, which is adjacent to Hastings. His less dramatic villas, which look nothing like this madhouse, line the more favoured streets of this seaside town.

Decimus B also built a lot around Regents Park and Kew Gardens in London - he was the daddy! Which makes me want this magical place to become something a bit more distinguished than a sex church death cult for people with daddy issues. In my head, I mean, where my imagination lives. I cast no such aspersions on reality.

That white crypt? Look on the floorplan, it’s in the cellar along with a bedroom, help. In fact here, watch the whole video if you dare, if you’re not alone and definitely not of a nervous and weak disposition or hoping for one of these angels to save you.

There are boutique hotels, and then there are boutique brothels, (in my imagination, you understand, I am merely continuing with my riffing! It turns out lawyers are expensive!) And while I’m all for the aesthetics, and indeed the practices, of a whoar’s boudoir ( and I am spelling it like that to get through your spam filters), said boudoir must decide what it really wants. 

Does the boudoir want

a) sado-masochistic transgressions watched over by saints and angels and other symbolic agents of a religious infrastructure, indulging perhaps in what Foucault described as “killing God in order to lose language in a deafening night and because this wound must make him bleed until there springs forth an immense alleluia lost in the interminable silence"

OR

b) floral curtains with a velvet tie-back? 

You decide!

3. CONVERTED 4-BED CHURCH IN WESTON-SUPER-MARE, £825K

Now for an under-a-million quid option in that same Gothic revival style: a converted church near the seaside beyond Bristol. I’m sure it won’t be anything like that creepy clock house, though, even though it says - oh hang on - “wall-mounted long candle holders…. oak staircases… sense of theatre… gargoyle-like statues in the form of an angel, a winged lion, an ox and an eagle… representing the saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”

Ok er let’s plough on with the photos anyway. Look at this kitchen, it’s nice. As kitchens in converted churches go, this one is fun. It’s fine!

And then there’s this view, which is fine too!

And the bedroom behind the view. Aw, those teddy bears. Cute!

And then, uh, some more teddy bears. Also cute.

And then gnomes.

Gnomes preparing for a round table meeting with the gnome illuminati.

Gnomes in a meeting room with a ceiling too low for humans - we’re in Gnomeland now, son.

The bigger gnomes are in charge; the smaller gnomes and the gargoyles are in indentured servitude.

And then there’s the - oh god no, no, LAURENCE STOP THIS, GET YOUR SEX DEATH CULT OFF THAT PURPLE CHAISE LONGUE IN THE TERRIFYING CIRCULAR SALON OF EVIL. Have we not suffered enough?

4) SOOTHING HOUSE IN MONTPELIER, BRISTOL, £725K.

Ok we need a palate cleanser. Here are some nice pictures of a house in Montpelier, Bristol with its own lovely workshop down the lovely garden. Not many colours involved at all. Not an inch of purple in sight.

5) FIXER-UPPER OF THE WEEK: 3-BED FLAT IN MILE END, LONDON, £375k

The building might look like a conflicted spaceship from a distance but this actual flat is charming. A garden with rosebushes at the front, and another separate backyard for barbecues. Your own front door, two floors, three bedrooms, nearly a thousand square feet and a 250 year lease. I bet they’d take an offer.

I know this area well and it’s got a good sports centre, a green walk through the beautiful secret wildlife ponds all the way to Victoria Park, and Mile End tube station right there. With three different tube lines!

Tell me what you think. “You gentrifying knobhead” is, of course, an option.

That’s it for now.

LINKS:

The most expensive house in the UK looks about as fun as a funeral

Oliver Wainwright looks inside the new flats in Battersea Power Station - six million quid for a squashy little window. Rich people are insane, but even they aint buyin em.

But WHO CARES BECAUSE HERE’S THE HEADLINE WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR : Cher Asks $85 Million for Epic Malibu Mansion With Climate-Controlled Wig Room Said to Contain 100 Wigs!