We don’t want to be insulting to anyone. But is it a carpet, or a putting green that went a little too far?
That’s the question 28 Braemar Terrace asks the moment you step off the chequerboard tiles and into the family room. Wall-to-wall emerald, edge to edge, with emerald curtains to match. It’s the colour of a freshly mown green at Augusta, and it has the same effect on a visitor: you lower your voice and look around for someone in a blazer. From the outside you’d never know. The house is quaint. The garden is beautiful. The pool curls around under the trees like something from a magazine, and the street is as leafy as Stirling gets. Then you open the door.
A lot of thought went into this interior. That much is obvious. Where the inspiration came from is less clear, so rather than guess, we’ve done the only sensible thing and played a round. Nine holes, one house, bring your own putter.
Hole 1, par 4: the front path.
A gentle opener. Gables, a long verandah, a big bare tree on a lawn, and absolutely nothing to warn you. Inside the front door is a black-and-white chequerboard floor, a timber staircase, a mirrored sideboard and two framed etchings of cathedrals. Very classy. Very calm. The course is lulling you in.
Hole 2, par 3: the family room.
Here’s the green. The agent describes this space as an open-plan kitchen, living and dining room overlooking the trees and the pool, with a bay window and a combustion fireplace. All true. They don’t mention that the floor is the most intensely green thing in the Adelaide Hills, which is a big claim for a suburb surrounded by actual forest. A white sofa sits in the middle like a golf buggy somebody forgot to park. Putt towards the fireplace and allow for the break off the rug.
Hole 3, par 4: the dining room.
Still on the green. The carpet just keeps going, round the corner and into the bay window, where green curtains frame the garden outside so you can compare the two greens side by side. Eight timber chairs, a vase of flowers in the middle of the table like a flag on the pin. Inside green 1, outside green 0.
Hole 4, par 5: the clubhouse.
Through the sliding doors is the agent’s favourite room, a custom cocktail bar they call “unlike anything you’ve seen before.” For once, a real estate agent is underselling it. One wall is exposed brick. The other walls are covered in brown toile wallpaper showing what looks like a lot of horses and carriages. The curtains are mustard velvet. The stools are pale yellow corduroy. On the shelf there’s a model sailing yacht, and on the brick wall, mounted like a trophy, is a cricket bat. Wrong sport, but we’ll allow it. This is the nineteenth hole, and we’ve only played four.
Hole 5, par 3: the formal lounge.
The agent leans hard on the word “elegant” throughout, and this is the room they mean it for. A brick fireplace, a chandelier, mustard pelmets over the windows and enough upholstered Victorian armchairs to seat a jury. “Ornate” is the other word they lean on. Ornate ceilings, ornate everything. They spend paragraph after paragraph on the ornate and the elegant and the generations of families who will gather here, and not one word on the colour scheme, which is a bit like reviewing Augusta and leaving out the grass.
Hole 6, par 4: the main bedroom.
A change of mood. The main bedroom has gone candy striper. The bedspread is striped. The curtains are striped. The pelmets above the curtains are striped, in the same stripe, so the stripes have stripes. There’s a floral wallpaper border round the ceiling, wall lights with little shades, and a cherub in a round gold frame keeping watch. The agent mentions the “exquisite Dresden China light fittings.” They do not mention the stripes, which you could see from space.
Hole 7, par 3: the green bedroom.
Uh oh, the green has escaped the carpet and climbed the walls. This bedroom is painted a deep bottle green, with a white brass bed, a cedar chest of drawers, a big gilt-framed landscape of a river and some cows, a cloche hat hanging off the bedhead, and a teddy bear in a red jacket sitting in a chair, watching. Nobody’s going to sleep in here without a nightlight.
Hole 8, par 5: the attic.
And now, the room that must have been designed by Heinz. The upstairs living area is enormous, with sloping ceilings and dormer windows and a wood heater with its flue going straight up through the middle. Every single surface, every wall and every slope of the ceiling, is mustard. Not a mustard accent. Not a feature wall. The whole room, top to bottom, has been dipped in the jar. The agent suggests it as a space for teenagers to “relax, entertain and retreat,” and we think any teenager would retreat from it very quickly. The bedroom next door is also mustard. The splashback in the kitchen downstairs is orange and mustard tile. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll find it everywhere.
Hole 9, par 4: the bathroom.
Finishing on the blue: damask tiles round the bath, cobalt tiles on the floor, a gold-framed shower screen and a porcelain door plate with roses on it. After the green and the mustard, this almost feels restful.
The back nine.
Here’s the thing. Step outside and Braemanor is genuinely lovely. A solar-heated pool curving round the house under huge old trees, a flagstone deck, a tennis court, rolling lawns, camellias, and a Sequoia planted to mark the Coronation. That’s 2,273 square metres of real, actual, outdoor green, where it belongs, a short walk from the cafés of Stirling village.
The scorecard.
Five bedrooms, two bathrooms, three living areas, one cocktail bar, one cricket bat, $1.8 to $1.9 million. The agent says it’s a home for the next generation. We say the next generation should bring a putter, a tin of white paint and a sense of humour. Keep the cricket bat.
