Nine Robson Road, Kenthurst, sits on 5 arable acres with dual road frontage about 45 minutes out of Sydney, and it does not do subtle. The agent’s copy calls it ‘a great entertainer’; we’d call it an actual venue that happens to have bedrooms attached. Seven double bedrooms, full brick, built with the kind of budget and imagination that produces a round entry portico held up by columns you could wrap both arms around, a Juliet-style balcony wrapping the whole upper level, and a driveway wide enough to double as a function car park.
Walk in and you’re greeted by twin curving staircases, wall-to-wall crimson carpet, and not one but three crystal chandeliers hanging low enough to graze a tall guest’s head on the way to the bar. Windows are red. Some walls are red. There is, at a rough count, more red carpet in this house than in most cinemas. Past the grand stairs is a full disco — sprung dance floor, mirror ball, exposed brick, its own red-carpeted stairwell up to a bar — and next to that, a fully fitted recording studio with a soundproofed booth, in case a big night needs a live album.
The kitchen is doing its best 1988 impression, all cream cabinetry and biscuit-coloured tile, and there’s a second one downstairs in case the first gets busy. The bathrooms, meanwhile, appear to have been decorated by committee, and possibly a committee that had a big night in the disco first: one is done out in bronze mirror tile with a floral motif and a sunken spa, the other goes full crimson with a red hexagonal jacuzzi that looks like it was poached from a wedding cake. Elsewhere on the floor plan: a squash court, a tennis court with its own pavilion, a cricket practice wicket, and an entertaining deck measuring a genuinely absurd 15 metres by 15 that could double as a go-kart track on a slow weekend.
It last sold with agents describing it as an ‘iconic property’ — which, to be fair, tracks — and it’s since changed hands, so somewhere out past that Blue Mountains vista there’s a new owner deciding whether the disco stays or the recording studio gets first dibs on a reno. Either way, whoever grew up filming a 21st down that red staircase has genuinely lived a childhood the rest of us can only aspire to. How decadent can one house get? Turns out: exactly this decadent.
