Who did this? Genuinely, who? We need a name. Was it Donald Trump? Did Donald Trump come to Paradise Point, Queensland, and quietly design a house, and then leave without telling anyone? We’re not saying it was him. We’re saying somebody with the exact same relationship to the colour gold got their hands on 2,982 square metres of Gold Coast waterfront and did not hold back for one single second of it.
Every room is a fresh assault. Gold ceilings, gold curtains, gold cornicing, a gold bathroom with a gold ceiling above gold marble, because apparently regular marble wasn’t making the point hard enough. The formal lounge is yellow walls under a blue ceiling under more gold trim, furnished with what we can only assume was the entire contents of a Versace showroom. Then there’s the statue — life-sized, marble, a man mid-brawl with two women, positioned dead centre at the base of the staircase so it’s the first thing you see and the thing you cannot stop thinking about afterwards. We’ve nicknamed it the attack possum. We have no better explanation for it than you do.
The listing tells us this sold for $6,000,000 in 2009 and hasn’t been on the market since, which explains why every photo looks like a time capsule sealed the same year Kanye was still making merely tasteful choices. We were hoping, honestly hoping, that whoever’s lived here since simply didn’t touch a thing — kept the tiger skin rug, kept the zebra skin rug, kept the full purple-adjacent gold fever dream exactly as photographed. Based on what’s already in these photos, we’re fairly confident that hope has already been met.
Seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, a private theatre, a gym, a wine cellar, and an indoor pool under its own glass dome — the bones of this place are genuinely serious money. It’s just that somewhere between “serious money” and “interior decorating,” a decision got made, and that decision was more. We don’t know who did this. We don’t think they know either. We just know we can’t stop looking.
