Boiling an egg? Sit down. Making a Bombe Alaska? Sit down. This Oxley kitchen has a booth in it. We don’t mean a breakfast nook in the next room. There is a teal vinyl bench seat built along the kitchen bench, within reach of the stove, so the cook can take the weight off at any point in the process. Why don’t more kitchens have one? Cooking is hard. With a big family it’s harder. Every kitchen needs somewhere to look busy, have a rest, sip a glass of wine and pretend something is cooking. This one has had one since the day it was built.
So here is the house, written up the way it deserves: as a recipe.
Serves: One family, for its whole life.
Prep time: Since construction. The house was built by its owner and lived in by that same owner ever since. That is why nothing in it has been “updated”, and why the listing can use the phrase “beautifully preserved” without lying.
Ingredients
Take one white weatherboard post-war cottage with blue trim on 607 square metres, with about 15 metres of street frontage. Add a picket fence and a front garden of raised beds and terracotta pots.
For the kitchen you will need teal cupboard doors with round brass knobs and white benchtops with curved ends. The cabinet ends finish in teal quarter-round shelves, which serve no purpose except joy. Palm-leaf wallpaper goes in as the splashback. Hang bamboo-print curtains on every window and fit a ceiling fan with cane blades. Lay a marble-look floor. Then the booths. One is a U-shaped teal banquette wrapped around a glass table. The second runs along the wall beside the bench, purely for sitting in the kitchen while things happen.
For the rest of the house, gold wallpaper and green carpet. Not a little of each. The hallway is lined in gold and floored in green, and they meet at the skirting like two neighbours who have agreed to disagree.
Method
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Walk in through the screened porch at the back. It is flyscreen, not glass. We checked, because the photos make it hard to tell. There are director’s chairs, a planter box along the rail and a patterned floor. Sit out there with a cup of tea and watch the yard.
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Pass through the hallway. Squint at the gold.
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Settle into the lounge, with its patterned wallpaper, mustard curtains and tan leather modular. Note that the television is the only object in the room that arrived after 1975.
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Move to the dining room, where a teak table and a china cabinet look through to the kitchen. Eat here if you are formal. Everyone else is in the booth.
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Go to bed. The main bedroom has a timber-panelled wall with a built-in bedhead and shelves, green damask wallpaper, and timber cabinetry under the windows. The bedspread is satin, teal, and ruffled to the floor. The second bedroom has two single beds and more green carpet. The third has a built-in timber desk. The bathroom is blue from tiles to towel.
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Go outside. There is a rear garage, a timber shed, a carport, a rotary clothesline and a lot of lawn. The handrail at the back steps has some rust. We are overlooking it. So should you.
Chef’s notes
The listing calls it a home “brimming with potential” and talks about gently updating it over time. Please don’t. One owner kept this house exactly right from the day it was built, down to the curved shelves, the curtains and the second booth. Mow the lawn, oil the timber, sort out the handrail, and leave the rest.
It goes to online auction at 4pm on Wednesday 11 November. It’s a gem. Leave it alone!
