Every so often a listing lands that makes the agent copy feel like a hostage note. This is one of those. The blurb for 79 Elanora Way, Karalee talks about a 5,109m² riverfront allotment, stone benchtops, a sports bar and ‘relaxed waterfront living,’ and at no point — not once, not even in passing — does it mention that the house itself is a cluster of concrete domes bolted together like a decommissioned Moon base that got lonely and moved to the Bremer River. We have so many questions. We are not confident a single one gets answered before auction day, and we’re not sure we’d survive the answers anyway.
You don’t walk into this house, you’re inducted. There’s a tunnel. An actual poured-concrete tunnel, leading to a star medallion set into the floor like you’re about to be sworn into something with robes and a secret handshake. From there it just escalates: a spiral staircase wrapped around two chrome poles rising out of a bed of river pebbles, which is either a staircase or a very serious water feature that also gets you upstairs. A fireplace hangs from the ceiling on a single pole, dead centre of a room, doing its best impression of mid-abduction. And then there’s the bathroom — a full circular spa sunk into the middle of the floor, so dominant the toilet and vanity have quietly accepted their new roles as furniture in someone else’s story. Nobody has ever walked into that room and thought about brushing their teeth first.
The kitchen ceiling is a full scalloped dome of built-in shelving, curved all the way round like the flight deck of something with a captain’s log. There’s a room with three flat-screen TVs mounted in a neat row facing a wall of exposed wiring and rust, mid-renovation in a way that strongly suggests someone got three episodes into fixing this place and had a documented change of heart. There’s a curved reception desk in one room that belongs in absolutely no residential floor plan we’ve ever seen, in a house with no explanation for why a reception desk exists at all. We have theories. We’re keeping them to ourselves. Downstairs there’s parking for four cars, a separate toilet, and a workshop, presumably for whatever project got this whole thing started and was never, at any point, going to be reasonable.
Upstairs, credit where it’s due, things almost calm down — a timber-panelled library loft with keyhole cutouts in the balustrade, like the architect briefly remembered this was meant to be a family home and not an escape room. And then, tucked into the corner of that same loft: an actual slide. Back down to the entry. The floor plan also lists a Porte Cochere out front and a Water Pond tucked onto the terrace, and, best of all, an outdoor Golf Tee positioned in exactly the spot you’d expect someone to line up a shot straight at the neighbour’s roofline. We’d love to know how many mid-swing apologies have been issued over the fence over the years, because on this trajectory ‘friendly neighbours’ feels like a stretch nobody’s actually tested.
So: renovate it, detonate it, or lean in completely and run it as a Star Trek away mission that never, ever wraps? We genuinely don’t know. What we do know is that Karalee is one of the better acreage suburbs in the Ipswich region, five minutes from the shops and twenty from Ipswich or Kenmore, and that whoever built this thing four decades ago had a vision and pursued it with a commitment most people reserve for their actual marriages. One small step for man, one giant drunken leap forward for architecture. It’s heading to auction, which means somewhere out there is a person who’s going to stand in that spa-throne bathroom, look up at the suspended fireplace, and think: yes, finally, home. We salute that person from a safe distance. We would also very much like a word with the neighbours next door, who have woken up to this view — and dodged the odd stray golf ball — every single morning for forty years and, as far as we can tell, have never once said anything. And an even bigger word with whoever was in the room when this was first drawn up and let it happen without a single person saying no.
