A Ballroom, a Barrel Bar and a Bath You Board

If this is what the 1920s looked like then, aside from the wars and the Great Depression, TAKE ME BACK.

28 Carlton Crescent is a restored 1920s bungalow sitting right on the water at Kogarah Bay. The agent calls the big room a formal living room with soaring vaulted ceilings. Look at it. Timber floors polished like a mirror, a ceiling criss-crossed with timber beams, a chandelier, and not one stick of furniture. That's a ballroom. Or a dance studio. Or the room where a man with a very serious moustache once announced his engagement. Honestly, it could be anything.

The rest keeps up. A curved wall of leadlight windows looking out over the bay, a black-and-white chequered bathroom with a clawfoot bath, a red-brick path winding through a lawn full of palms, and a gazebo for when the ballroom gets too crowded. It's for rent, at $2,100 a week. That's a lot of parties to make it pay, but you'd have the room for them.

A classic. The same family bought this place in 1973 and, going by the photos, decided the job was done.

The kitchen is wood, wall to wall, in that glossy woodgrain that bounces the light straight back at you, sitting on a floor of crazy-paved marble. Then you head down to the bottom level and find the good stuff: exposed timber beams, a wine rack the length of the wall, Bally posters, an old valve radio, and a row of barrels lined up like they're waiting for the next party. Which raises the only question that matters: how much partying has been done down there? Fifty-odd years of Christmases, 21sts and "just one more", and the barrels aren't talking.

Also, the bathroom. A mustard bath, a gold-framed shower screen, and that same crazy-paved marble floor, because once you've found a look you love, why stop?

The agent mostly wanted to talk about the huge Oregon beams, which, fair enough, are holding the whole thing up. It sold at auction on 17 October for $1,620,000, so somebody new owns the barrels now. We hope they keep them full.

From the street, it's a nice inter-war bungalow in Forrest. Then you notice the other house. Stuck to the side is a white, pointy building covered in shingles, like a bungalow and a very stylish shed had a baby. We spent a good while trying to work out what it is.

Turns out it's famous. This is Empire House, by Melbourne's Austin Maynard Architects, and it won the Canberra Medallion and a commendation at the National Architecture Awards. The mystery building is a bedroom pavilion wrapped in hand-finished metal shingles, and there's a second pavilion out the back with a glass roof over the kitchen. So it's award-winning. We still think it looks like a house wearing a chainmail onesie.

Now, the lounge room. Next to the stone fireplace is a glass cabinet, and standing inside the glass cabinet is a spotted figure about the size of a small child, very still. We don't know why. We're not sure we want to know. In the doorway behind it sits a cat. Does the cat come with the house? Because the doll in the case can go.

Is it a house, or a subway station from the 1950s? 195 Hawthorn Road is VERY art deco: curved white walls, black racing stripes, pillars and a stepped entrance. This is a house that desperately wanted to be a subway station, or an old-school American diner, and grew up to be a lovely family home instead.

Inside, it keeps the faith. Black and silver leadlight front doors, glass that bends around the corners of the lounge, and three restored Art Deco fireplaces. Out the back the pool is shaped like a cloud. Not a kidney. A cloud, custom made, with a spa.

But one thing. The bathroom. Mustard tiles with a black stripe that climbs up into arches, a terrazzo floor, and a bath set into a tiled plinth with rounded ends like a train carriage. Do you climb in the bath, or hop aboard? The auction's been postponed, so there's still time to find out.