Do not touch this house. We mean that sincerely. Somewhere in the Lane Cove real estate machine there is an agent typing “scope to renovate, extend or rebuild” and we would like to formally submit a counter-offer: scope to leave it exactly as it is and start charging admission.
This is a first-time-on-the-market, one-family-for-fifty-years home, and it shows in the best possible way. The lounge room has gone all in on teal — damask wallpaper up the walls, shag carpet on the floor, colour-matched so precisely it can only have been intentional. The kitchen is wallpapered wall to wall in yellow flowers, curtains included, because apparently someone decided the walls weren’t doing enough on their own. There’s a pink bedroom. There’s a bathroom in pink suite and pink tile, presided over by a green toilet lid that has, against all odds and several decades of trend cycles, never once been asked to leave.
The agent’s pitch is “renovate, extend or rebuild,” which is real estate for “please, for the love of god, make this beige.” We are begging whoever buys this to reconsider. This is not a fixer-upper. This is a museum piece that happens to have three bedrooms and a Hills Hoist. Would you gut your own childhood home the second you got the keys? Would you, really? Somewhere out there is a family who lived an entire half-century surrounded by this exact colour palette and loved it enough to never change a thing. The least the rest of us can do is look at the photos and feel something.
Level block, quiet street, walk to the village — all the usual Lane Cove selling points are technically true. But let’s not pretend that’s the headline. The headline is a green toilet lid that outlasted five prime ministers, and we would like it noted for the record that we are on its side.
