Nick Darbyshire and his partner Leah are looking for an investment – but they’re put off by the large crowd. Lots of interest means the price will get driven up.
He seems a little reassured when reminded that most of the people filing into Julia Gillard’s renovated bungalow – perhaps 100 in 20 minutes – are gawkers. Plus there’s the media contingent exiled to the verge.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he says.
Forget the crowds, what’s the colour of your Altona dreams, Nick?
“I guess we’d rent it out first and live in it later.”
And then he gets a great idea. “If we turned it into a short-stay place, we could probably get $400 a night.”
Capitalise on the celebrity connection. “Yeah.” It’d pay for itself, get the interest payments down. “And then we’d move in.”
What would you change? The walk-in closet was a keeper; so, too, the granite benches in the kitchen and the decking outside the main bedroom. “Aw, but the colour of that en suite was a bit off,” he says, referring to the Palmolive green tiles on the bathroom floor.
He isn’t the only one to pull a face at the bathroom’s makeover. A woman called Elsie crinkles her nose as she walks in.
“I don’t like this,” she says.
But the house itself has huge potential . . . as a pile of rubble. “You wouldn’t pull it down straightaway,” she says. “Everything feels new at the moment so it would be too nice to just get rid of. I’d live here for a while. But in the long run, the only choice would be . . .”
Put up a bunch of units? “You’d have to develop, to make it worthwhile,” she says.
What a sad end to “The Allure of Luxury” as the real estate brochure describes 9 Medford Street.
“Sad from an historical point of view,” Elsie concedes.
The house certainly has its sexy side. For those extravagant couples who like to christen every room on moving into a new home, there are two – two! – gas log fires in the living rooms. One has a television set on the wall above the flames in anticipation that passion eventually wears out.
Many of the walls are hung with large paintings from the Ikea school of art, and a quick peek behind each one reveals no dark or cracked patch of plaster where a person might have hit their head repeatedly in frustration.
Ah, is it unkind to mention the fruit bowl no longer empty but plumped with figs? A discreet squeeze reveals them to be waxen.
One curious aspect of the inspection: there was an extraordinary number of Chinese-speaking people looking in the cupboards. One of them flushing the toilet. They weren’t sent as one last act of up-yours by Kevin, were they?
The question confuses one man who has stroked his chin for much of his walkabout. “Who?” he says, with outsized annoyance. “No! Altona just good investment.”
