It’s red. Not “striking red,” which is the phrase the agent has chosen, like there’s a version of this bathroom that whispers. There is no whispering. It is red, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with a red ceramic cat standing guard over the sink in case anyone was still unsure. People driving through the mountains nearby can see that it’s red. There is no other information you need about this bathroom.
Everywhere else, the house is just as committed. The lounge runs an avocado-green patterned carpet under soaring timber ceilings and a genuinely impressive hand-carved sandstone fireplace — this part’s actually beautiful, we’ll give it that. Then you get to the kitchen, which is raw timber cabinetry fitted with cupboard doors in red, yellow and green, arranged like someone found a leftover set of primary-coloured filing cabinets and decided that was close enough to a design scheme. There’s a second living room with a stained-glass door and a built-in timber desk that looks like it was custom-made for someone’s home business circa 1978, because it probably was.
The agent calls this “unmistakable craftsmanship,” which we’ve decided is real estate for “we didn’t know how else to say old.” And to be fair, it is craftsmanship — hand-carved stone, custom joinery, built-in everything. It’s also a house that time did not so much preserve as forget to visit. This should be a museum. Not a metaphorical one — an actual museum, with a plaque, that serves two purposes: reminding people that this is what architecture and interior design used to look like, and reminding them, gently but firmly, why it stopped.
Three bedrooms, one bathroom you’ll never forget, and an eight-car garage on an 800 square metre block for reasons the listing does not attempt to explain. Whoever buys this either loves a project or has eight cars and nowhere else to put them. Either way, we salute the red.
