13 February 2011

1 Fitzgibbon Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

I spotted this one one day when I was coming home on the tram and was almost blinded by it. I thought it looked like somebody got a catering pack of tinfoil and just wrapped up their house, as if they were trying to keep it warm. However, further inspection shows that this house isn't actually finished - look inside and you can see that there are no interior walls. This has been sitting like this for over a year now, and there is no evidence of further construction in or around the house. This seems very odd to me - how can you get this far with a house, to the extent that you've got a proper roof on it and even a TV aerial, only to find that you can't quite finish it off? Did they just suddenly run out of money? Or perhaps it is lived in and finished, and walls just aren't as necessary as I thought they were.

We actually have a theory that this might be the Australian residence of conspiracy theorist and Muse frontman Matt Bellamy. He doesn't seem the type who would bother with walls, and it would make the silver foil exterior much more logical - Matt can't let the aliens get to him! But Christ, if anything, this is going to attract the aliens rather than scaring them off. Maybe the owners are simply trying reach the niche conspiracy theorist market. Because that totally exists and everything.

This tinfoil giant is attached to the perfectly normal (if in need of a lick o' paint) older house in front of it. I think that's very queer indeed - why attach another rather large house to yours in the first place (especially when you need to buy some paint for the existing one already), and if you're going do it, why not at least keep with the same style of house? I don't understand at all. As a charming finishing touch, it seems that recently some of the tinfoil on the side of the house has actually deteriorated and has been replaced with some tasteful black binliners. Lovely! Still, I think I prefer decorating your house with materials from the cleaning aisle of the supermarket than having a peeling weatherboard exterior. In case you haven't figured it out yet, I have quite a grudge against weatherboard houses that are anything less than immaculate.

Perhaps one day they'll finish this off. Until then, maybe I'll speed things up by supplying them with other useful building materials such as baking paper and catering-grade food wrap. Maybe they're just waiting for more binliners to arrive to serve as the interior walls. When that happens, the place will probably be featured in interior design magazines. It'd be better than most of the shite in those at the moment!

Rating: Truly bizarre, lying somewhere around Unpleasant.

2 comments:

  1. This blog manages to be simultaneously rude and ignorant.. It sounds like the author is new to the area, otherwise they might realise that such properties are the essence of this area. Step back a few years before Brunswick became the 'trendy' urban centre it is today and you would notice that this is/was a 'working class area. It might be considered a hub for the nouveau riche today, but the original residents of Brunswick and particularly west Brunswick, know that this is not so and that publican bars like the "union" until very recently were 'topless' bars for the working class locals. As the author appears to have lots of spare time to complain about this property, perhaps they ought to go and offer to paint it - for the love Brunswick!

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