Faulconbridge sits high in the Blue Mountains, elevated enough that the trees start at eye level — which is handy, because it gives you something to look at that isn’t the honeycomb wallpaper. 5 Shirlow Avenue had a view worth selling on its own. It sold on the wallpaper instead.
Retro house furnished with retro furniture, or retro house that simply never got the memo the seventies ended? We can’t tell, and at this point we’ve stopped trying. What we can tell is that somewhere along the way, someone drew a line in the sand marked “no greige” and then set it on fire for good measure. The kitchen is green. The stairwell is teal. The lounge ceiling is gold with a jungle mural in it. There’s a room that’s black and lime with a red door, like someone lost a bet. One bedroom has gone full cobalt blue and backed it up with mustard curtains, and somehow — genuinely, we checked twice — it works. Nobody in this house has ever been talked into a feature wall in “warm oatmeal.”
Then there’s the clocks. We counted a starburst clock in the kitchen, another in the timber-panelled sitting room, and lost the thread after that — this is a house where checking the time is less a necessity and more a design motif that recurs whether you need it to or not. We are formally raising the question of how many starburst clocks constitute a problem, and formally declining to answer it, because at some point admiration and concern become the same feeling.
Underneath the styling there’s a genuinely flexible five-bedroom layout — multiple living zones, a downstairs area that could run as its own wing, and enough separation for multi-generational living if that’s the plan. The bones are sound, the views are real, and the treetop outlook does a lot of quiet work while the interiors do all the shouting. Strictly by appointment only, which feels right. A house like this should make you commit to seeing it in person before it lets you in on the joke.
