Sixty-four Branksome Gardens, City Beach, is what happens when someone wants a castle and refuses to be talked out of it by, in order: several builders, the local council, and her own father, who is an architect and presumably knows a thing or two about what a wall can and cannot do. Tani Richards wanted rounded stone walls, cathedral windows, a turret, and a moat, on a block small enough to save the Norfolk pines out front. Everyone told her no. The council tried to use her own plans as an excuse to slap a two-storey height limit on the whole street, which is either paranoia or the highest compliment a local government has ever paid a renovation. She won anyway, hired architect James Shaw, and got her castle: six bedrooms, four bathrooms, one contractor’s receivership weathered along the way, and, we assume, a lot of people finally admitting she’d been right the whole time.
The stonework is hand-corbelled limestone, laid the way actual medieval masons did it, which is a genuinely impressive sentence to be able to write about a house in a Perth beachside suburb best known for its footy oval. The wrought iron was forged locally to a medieval pattern. The stained-glass window came from a cathedral overseas. The timber doors are old and Chinese and imported at what we can only imagine was significant expense and paperwork. And then, having assembled all of that heritage and craftsmanship and cross-continental provenance, the owner sourced her gothic light fittings from a Disneyland gift shop display, which is the single most honest thing about this entire build. Nobody is claiming to be a purist here. They just wanted a castle and they wanted it to look cool.
The sunroom is the most sincere room in the house — stone arches, ocean views, a hand-mosaicked glass dining table, and a Great Dane standing guard at the window looking, we cannot stress this enough, exactly like a small horse. Everywhere else the house is having considerably more fun with itself: a Moroccan lounge behind red velvet curtains that appears to have wandered in from a different, more decadent house entirely, a rooftop gazebo for sunset viewing, a courtyard plunge pool between twin stone arches, chesterfield armchairs stacked up like the owner bought them by the pallet, and — our favourite unexplained decision in this entire archive — a full cheetah-skin runner laid the length of the internal spiral staircase. Nobody asked for an explanation. Nobody was given one.
Three generations of the Richards family lived here before selling in 2017 for $5.9 million, at which point Tani and her husband went off and built an earth castle in Bullsbrook, because evidently one architecturally improbable home per family was never going to cut it. The Sandcastle remains one of the most photographed houses on the Perth coast and it is, to be extremely clear, not currently for sale. We checked. We also checked about the dog. The dog is not for sale either. We had to ask.
