If humble is not your thing and you’re more into panther wallpaper, a black bathroom, taxidermy and bonsai trees, then 334 Maroondah Highway, Croydon is the place for you. There is a full moose head on the lounge room wall. There is a leopard skin draped over the Chesterfield. Please tell us these are imitation.
But the real reason this one made the list is that the house kept its old photos. The property page on realestate.com.au holds three sets, nearly twenty years apart, and if you flick through them in order you can watch a sensible Federation weatherboard slowly go to the dark side. The bones of this house are magnificent, and it has come from very humble beginnings. Here is the file.
Exhibit A: August 2006.
This is the house before it sold in August 2007 for $745,000. Cream weatherboards, bottle-green trim, lacework on the verandah and a front garden of roses and lavender. Inside it is polished timber and doilies. The dining room sits behind a carved timber arch with leadlight panels, a red tablecloth and green carpet. There is a teal library with a fireplace and a beige computer tower the size of a bar fridge. The lounge has two tartan sofas on a floral carpet. The kitchen is solid timber with ruched lace blinds, and there is a teal billiard room with a full-size table. Out the back, a kidney pool and a round spa under a gazebo.
It is lovely. It is somebody’s Nan’s house. The most dangerous thing in it is the carpet.
Exhibit B: November 2016.
It sold again in July 2016 for $1,180,000 and was leased that November for $650 a week. In between, somebody went through with white paint and no mercy. The tartan is gone. The lace is gone. The green trim outside is now dark. The library is a white room with two floor-to-ceiling black bookcases and not one book on them. The kitchen is white shaker with a white benchtop, two pendant lights hanging over the island like they are waiting for instructions. A big timber deck looks out on a plain lawn.
It is tasteful. It is a rental. You could not pick it out of a line-up. Hold that blank canvas in your mind, because somebody else did.
Exhibit C: 2023.
The house sold in November 2020 for $1,450,000. By the time it came back on the market in 2023, the blank canvas had been filled in. All of it.
Start in the lounge. White walls, crystal chandeliers, pale floorboards, and a moose. A full moose head, antlers out, mounted above the kitchen opening as if it walked through the wall and got stuck. The far wall is papered in Japanese waves. Bronze dogs sit on the floor. On a carved pedestal by the TV is what we think is a leopard head on a pole, and down the other end is a leopard-print sofa, in case the moose gets lonely.
The front room is worse, or better, depending on you. Red damask walls, a dark cornice trimmed in gold, a red leather Chesterfield with a full leopard skin thrown across it, and two riveted aluminium armchairs that look like they were cut out of a bomber. There is a glass cabinet of skulls and carved figures, a bow leaning in the corner, and a dark portrait watching you from the wall. It has a beautiful bay window. Nobody will ever look at it.
The main bedroom is where the 2016 rental would have wept. The ceiling is painted black. The walls are covered in rows of panther faces, hundreds of them, all glaring at the bed. The transition from a white lounge (minus the moose) to a sex panther bedroom is quite alarming. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.
Then the bathroom. Black marble with white veins from the floor to the cornice, a red ceiling, and a black and white freestanding tub, which is something special. The roses in the stained-glass windows are the touch we weren’t expecting. Somebody looked at a black marble bathroom with a red ceiling and decided it needed softening.
Outside, the bonsai take over. Bonsai on stone plinths at the front door, bonsai on red posts along the pool, bonsai in the front garden among black river stones. There are more bonsai here than in Mr Miyagi’s backyard. A lion statue prowls one end of the pool, a bronze nude stands at the other, and Hokusai’s Great Wave is printed on a glass screen beside the barbecue.
The verdict.
The decoration doesn’t come with the house, and we know that. What does come with it is 1,764 square metres, six bedrooms, five bathrooms, a pool pavilion, a sauna and a bedroom upstairs that the floorplan says has roof access. It sold in August 2023 for $1,900,000, and the agent described it as “Magnificent, Impressive, Stunning!” without a single word about the moose.
Three owners, three personalities. 2006 was Nan. 2016 was a rental. 2023 was whoever owns the moose. Somewhere in Melbourne that moose is now hanging on a new wall, and we hope it’s well. Watch the video for the full tour.
