69 Albion Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last few days - it's a busy time, so we may not quite be able to maintain daily posts. However, today I bring to you a place that just baffled me.

Initially, it just seems like a run-of-the-mill example of a house suffering from a lack of maintenace. It's the bread and butter of Mow Your Lawn!, the sort of thing that I casually swore at on the day I coined this blog's name. The paint is peeling, flaking, and just generally decaying; this is so extreme on the side that you would be hard-pressed to tell what the wall's original colour even was. The crappy front fence is an aesthetic displeasure that belongs in front of an underfunded school rather than a house; it has been knocked over at right, and appears to have been left knocked over for so long that the foliage has adapted and grown around it.

"There ain't no awning here and there never was!"

Worst of all, the awnings that used to be over both of the front windows at the front ... are no more. There are just a couple of bits of tatty old splintery wood poking out from the walls above the windows, indicating where awnings used to be. Weeds have even started to make a home on the walls, not in the majestic way of ivy but in the ragtag way of, well, weeds. This place isn't quite coming apart at the seams like dear old 39 Barry Street, but it looks like that is what's in its future.

... then you notice the front lawn. Go back to that first photo. Yeah, that's right, the lawn is neatly mown. The flowers seem to have been given some care. The shrubs are in order. The letterbox is clean. The tree at right may be shrouding one side of the house and there may be growth settling on the wall and the remnants of an awning, but the garden itself is perfectly orderly. The house may be a disgrace, far away from its glory days, but the people here have actually mown their lawn! The fence may be kicked over and the plants growing around it, but the plants themselves are being helped to thrive!

Well the shrub doesn't seem unhappy about having a fence foisted upon it.

We can't make heads nor tails of this. While the garden is neat, it's not a showpiece; it's hardly the garden of somebody so obsessive about their plants that they've put all their love and affection into it at the expense of their home's structural integrity. The best explanation I have is that they really couldn't give a shit about maintaining their house or their fence, but they have an outright fear of snakes and spiders and don't want an overgrown front lawn that would host such things. Otherwise, what? This house seems to me a bit beyond the "oh we'll fix it up when we've got the time/money/inclination".

Rating: That neat front lawn means this place just falls on the Damnable side of the Damnable/Condemnable divide.

89 Wilson Street, Moonee Ponds, VIC, Australia

It's just a little ugly but nothing too bad, right? Right ...?

This place simply confuses me. From the side, it just looks like somebody has taken an old shop/light industry and done it up into a residence. There's nothing wrong with it, though it's not really to my tastes - besides being a bit bricky and blocky, it commits the sin of glass bricks, and corrugated iron really shouldn't be used for much beyond garden sheds. Though I suppose it does stick with the building's industrial heritage. It's honestly a welcome bit of urban renewal, and we need more of this sort of thing. If this particular renovation is to your tastes, then more power to you.

Well as long as you don't walk around the front ...

But then go around the front. It looks like an absolutely dingy abandoned shop! The brick wall across the front is totally uninviting, splotchy, graffitied, and in urgent need of a lick o' paint and some repairs. To add to all that, although its structural integrity seems fine, the windows are perplexingly at a slight angle to the wall.  I don't know about you, but I would be completely embarrassed if this were the front of my house. What is this, a residence or an abandoned hardware shop? Make up your mind!

A closer view, just in case you had any doubts about its dinginess.

Perhaps the front is heritage listed? Well, no amount of Googling indicated anything of the sort, and even heritage protection wouldn't prohibit some cosmetic repairs. However, Google did turn up a couple of interesting results. Firstly, a Government Gazette of 3 March 1948 (pdf) reveals some of this building's heritage; it wasn't a hardware shop but the home to "Dynamic Engineering", who had applied to the Transport Regulation Board to register a commercial goods vehicle in conjunction with their work as building and civil engineering contractors. Secondly, well, this is just a bit weird. It's some new age-y sort of group's newsletter, and it gives this address for the "New Environmental Technologies Annual Conference Administration Centre", complete with an appeal for more office staff to help out with the organisation. Zuh? The building doesn't much look it to me. Then again, I suppose they are the sort of people who are likely to engage in the renovation of an old building. And that newsletter is from February 1998. Not sure what the deal is here; if it is or was some group's offices, there is no indication these days of that function.

Whatever the case, I think the key point here is: if you're going to engage in a bit of urban renewal, at least go all the way and spruce up the whole damn thing. This decaying and neglected front wall, along with an abandoned shop on the corner with Fanny Street, are unsightly blemishes on Wilson Street, otherwise one of the nicest streets in Moonee Ponds. Walking along it in summer is an absolute joy; it has so many beautiful old houses with well-kept, fragrant front gardens. It's one of those streets that illustrates why I love this part of the world so much. It's just a shame #89 is one of the first impressions when you come in from the east.

Rating: Damnable.

341 Victoria Street and 92 Henkel Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

I've been a little busy these last few days. I've been fine though, just doing fun stuff like maths assignments and turning 20 (anyone want to change my colostomy bag? I'm too old to do it myself). However, if I had lied to you and told you that I had a chronic case of food poisoning after eating food from this place here, would you believe me? I bet you would.

341 Victoria Street in all its derelict glory.

Ok, ok, I know it's closed and it has been for some time. I don't care. I have a funny feeling that it probably looked exactly the same when it was in operation. I wonder why it was closed down?  Now, before you go on with something like "stop stereotyping Chinese takeaways, they're perfectly clean", I might just go on a little tangent to tell you about this place I saw in Sydney's Chinatown back in August 2010. It was a takeaway Chinese place right near the railway station, which I imagine gave it more than its fair share of customers each day. It was pretty damn grubby - I would have never set food inside - but I thought it must be at least acceptable in order to continue operating in such a busy area. How naive of me! I happened to walk past one quiet morning on the way to the train, and witnessed five or six rats come scurrying out from under the door of this place and vanish into the drain. I was honestly almost sick. I guess they would have just been pissed off to lose the best item off their breakfast menu!

So yeah, what I'm trying to get at is that this place probably did close down due to a failed food safety inspection. However, there is still someone who lives in the space above the shop - maybe the ex-owner? This would make sense since I saw him as we walked by, hacking and coughing and spitting off the rooftop. Truly charming!

Hungry? No? What a surprise!

However, at least that place is actually closed down, unlike this. As far as I can see, this one is perfectly functional.

92 Henkel Street (Victoria Street frontage).

Now I don't know about you, but if I was a food wholesaler, I'd kind of like to get some customers every now and then. In order to do that, I'd have an attractive and most importantly CLEAN shop front. This one fails on every account. It looks as if it used to be a mechanic's workshop, and I wouldn't be surprised if the food in here was prepared on old oily benchtops. Organic products? Yeah, probably just the algae they scrape out of the sink every day. I don't know, maybe I'm being too harsh. It might be really nice inside. Maybe. Can you tell I'm not even convincing myself?

Oh, and get a roof. That wouldn't hurt.

Please, if you're starting a business in the food industry, at least paint and clean up your shop! Things can only get better from there. But if you decide not to, just don't come running to me when you get shut down for having sea snails attached to your taps.

Rating: Damnable

5 Bent Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

Click for a larger version that shows the flakiness and tardiness in detail.

Charlotte's been terribly slack and lazy (by which I mean not lazy at all, and certainly busier than me), so the job falls again to me to provide today's dose of man-made failure.  I'm going to stick very close to yesterday's entry and this empty lot and stay on Bent Street in Brunswick West.  Now, poor Bent Street, I don't mean to knock it or make it sound like some miserable slummy road.  In fact, three of my favourite properties in Brunswick West can be found along its length, one of which is home to a couple of adorable cats.  However, in its three short blocks, Bent Street also has five properties worthy of this blog; the previous two, this one, a fourth I'll cover in due course, and this Murray St shitbox is on the intersection with it.

Now, you may think 5 Bent Street is adjacent to yesterday's subject at number 7.  That's too logical.  In between them is Cumming Street (yes, we laugh at that all the time) and two properties that are numbered in Cumming's sequence.  Not long after moving to the area, this property made me just as curious as 7.  While 7 was evidently abandoned, this one signs of being lived in, of which one was big and obvious - a clean, fairly modern car normally parked in the driveway (see picture above).  And that just caused me even more confusion.  The car was clearly in decent mechanical and aesthetic condition, yet this place is falling apart.  Now, I'm sure we've all met guys who'll let their house fall apart while they masturbate with their car for hours, but as you can see in the picture at right, this is hardly a car-lover's car!  If you're taking reasonable care of your vehicle, wouldn't you also keep your property at least vaguely presentable?

This house isn't ever going to be the most exceptional piece of real estate, but you could tidy it up and make it look neat and presentable.  As it is?  The paint appears to have gone untouched since it was first applied so many years ago, alongside the footpath is a sad excuse for a fence, the lawn is ratty and has been threatening to lose all control for as long as I've known the property, and the roof actually looks like it has grown a layer of mould or even guano to keep it company.  Actually, maybe this isn't some Mafia den or meth lab after all, but somebody cannily starting their own guano mine.  They're patient!

Rating: Damnable.

7 Bent Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

Sigh. This lot had potential, you know? Once upon a time, a nice old house sat here. By the time I came to Melbourne, it was more of an “abandoned old house”. Here it is, as seen on Google Streetview:

Now, the garage was pretty ugly and needed to go, but the house itself had so much potential. If somebody had the will to do it up and restore it to its former glory, it could have been lovely. I often looked in and wondered how it appeared in its heyday. But no. Some developer evidently just found it easier to knock the place over. I took some photos of the demolition in May 2009:

So what was built in its place? Nothing aesthetically pleasing, I assure you. A couple of boxy, unattractive townhouses have arisen where a beautiful old house once sat, complete with inexplicable decorative poles as a token gesture to “character”. Honestly, it's not the worst example of modern architecture in the area, but seriously, can you explain those poles? And build a bloody roof:

Turned out our old friends at Walshe & Whitelock were the real estate agents for this. It took months to sell, not that I was tremendously surprised. About half a year passed before the completed building was actually occupied; we just kept walking past a forlorn "for sale" sign and big, uncurtained windows showing off empty space.  Given the place has been stained by the hand of Walshe & Whitelock, I imagine we'll be back in a decade to chronicle how much it has fallen into disrepair.

Rating (dereliction and destruction of abandoned old house): Condemnable
Rating (new occupied property): Damnable

Pomare railway station, Taita, Hutt Valley, New Zealand

The bland northern end of Pomare station.

Earlier this month, I ranted about Macaulay station.  Well, the disease of soulless railway stations is by no means confined to Australia.  Meet a dreary trans-Tasman example: Pomare station, on the Hutt Valley commuter line (part of the longer Wairarapa Line).  Contrary to what some people may have you believe, Pomare station is not in a suburb of the same name as no such suburb exists; it is at the northern end of Taita.

Now, some parts of the Hutt Valley, including Taita, can be a bit depressing.  Large swathes of these suburbs are state housing (or ex-state housing) built in the mid-twentieth century, and with that comes the usual socio-economic disadvantage and depression.  This isn't to say that the area is totally and irredeemably crap, because it's not, but the Hutt Valley has never really been my favourite part of the Wellington region.  However, on a cold, damp, and windswept morning in July 2010, I found myself trainspotting at Pomare station.  And, well, oh dear!  Besides my fingers almost freezing to my camera, the station is no place you particularly want to be in a hurry.  It's not the worst station I've ever been to, and it's not quite on the level of the aforementioned Macaulay, but it's still pretty undesirable.

The southern end of Pomare toile- er, station.

If the people who authorised this station wanted to convey the impression that northern Taita is a bland, depressing, squalid sort of place where nobody wants to be through choice, then they've done a damn good job.  It has few redeeming aesthetic qualities; all it can really say in its defence is that it has a real, sloped roof, hence it isn't totally boxy.  The passenger facilties are as spare and basic as possible, and damn uncomfortable.  The building barely fulfils its basic function of providing passenger shelter from the elements.  You know what it looks like to me?  From the southern end (picture at right), it resembles a public toilet planted between two busy railway lines.

In fact, it looks like two public toilets.  The building looks like a rather large cubicle, the sort of which you often see decaying by beaches where the local council doesn't care that much about swimmers (especially since, from this end, the building is deceptively boxy).  Then there's that ramp, leading to a rape-y underpass that really does have a lingering scent of urine; when descending from the platform, it feels more like entering an underground loo than it does when you enter some actual underground loos!  Are you totally incapable of holding in the contents of your bladder on the oh-so-long trip between Upper Hutt and Wellington?  Step off at Pomare's public toilets and unleash your torrent!  Space for everyone.

Of course, the truth is, this station is so basic that it actually doesn't have toilet facilities at all, no matter how much the underpass may smell of one.  And when I was there in July, the whiffs of urine were mingling with the smell of dampness.  I was charmed, can't you tell?

Rating: Damnable

121 and 123 Dawson Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

121 and 123 Dawson Street, on the corner with Ferriman Street.

Remember my original post about horrid, soulless boxes around Melbourne?  It's about time that we featured another one of these miserable attempts at medium density housing.  Dawson Street in Brunswick West is home to a couple of adjacent examples, one of which has now fortunately been renovated to bring it kicking and screaming ... well, not into the 21st century, but at least a decade closer to the present than its forlorn neighbour.
 

Closer view of 123 Dawson Street.

Let's start, however, with 123 Dawson Street, which retains its original exterior.  I cannot fathom who designed this or why they thought anybody would want to live here.  How do you give directions to this place?  "Yeah, you turn onto Dawson Street, then I'm at number 123; just keep an eye out for the ugly orange brick place with no charm whatsoever."  Wherever you go, you're destined to spot eyesores along these lines, and I have to say they are the very low point of architecture.  Even your modern wanky bollocks with windows at funny angles, feature walls that look like they are plastered with mould, and an exterior painted the colour of mushrooms and despair are more appealing than this.

At least in the case of modern wank, somebody has put some effort into the design, however misguided that effort may be.  123 Dawson Street is functional and nothing more.  It's just four walls of the most plain variety with some windows in them.  Forget a proper roof.  Forget eaves.  Forget anything more than the barest essentials - four walls around you and a ceiling above.  Utterly thoughtless design for thoughtless developers who just wanted to throw up a block of flats as quickly as possible, cram in hapless sods, and make off with their money.

Closer view of 121 Dawson Street.

A few years ago, somebody recognised the folly of this design and renovated one of the two blocks - 121 Dawson Street.  Unfortunately, this turned out to be a fairly thoughtless renovation.  The walls were slapped with a new cladding, a bizarre "feature" was whacked around the upstairs middle window (straight from Pissweak Feature World), and ... that's about it.  Worst of all, it was painted the colour of mushrooms and despair!  Seriously, who paints their building so that it is reminiscent of a drizzly English day?  The renovator spent all this money on a renovation, and instead of using a tasteful colour scheme to highlight their work and make the place stand out, they have painted it so that it looks bland and sinks from view and memory immediately.  At least it looks about a decade younger than its neighbour now, so I guess the owner can fleece people for a higher rent on the basis of the most superficial work.  It's the rental equivalent of music companies charging you $30 for the "deluxe edition" of an album that normally retails for $18 but has a whopping one extra track and liner notes from a sufficiently sycophantic journalist or associate.

Rating: Unpleasant (121) / Damnable (123)

19 Melville Road, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

So, you're hungry. You're craving a nice big pizza from one of Melbourne's many delicious independent pizza shops. Well aren't you lucky that you stopped at Hot Pizza House on Melville Road near the Albion Street intersection (some of the best damn pizzas in Melbourne!), rather than continuing south down Melville Road to be horribly misled by “Gibbi's Pizza”.

The first time I saw this place was about five years ago. It isn't a pizza shop now, it wasn't a pizza shop then, and I don't bloody well know when it actually was. Nonetheless, it still appears in some business directories that need urgent updating. The shop occupying the other half of this lot, “Melville Road Physiotherapy”, is a similar story – except, perhaps, for the fact it looks disused for even longer. Gibbi's Pizza appears to be somebody's studio; somebody who is clearly too lazy to actually take down the old signage and make the place appear anything other than dingy. Melville Road Physiotherapy now looks like it's either 1). abandoned or 2). an illegal den offering other forms of “physiotherapy” with imported girls from southeast Asia who are almost certainly underage.

At least Gibbi's Pizza looks like it was, once upon a time, a decent, functioning shop. The Physiotherapy, on the other hand? That small door and those narrow windows at the top of a soulless brick wall were not attractive when they were first put in place, and the passage of time has not been kind. It looks like it was built to keep customers – and prying eyes – out. It makes you think that even in its days of business, it was a shonky “physiotherapy” akin to those dodgy “Thai massage” places you see in Sydney's Chinatown with mildewed curtains covering the windows, and lights that are only ever on after about 11pm.

Rating: Damnable (Gibbi's Pizza side) / Condemnable (Physiotherapy side)

300 Dudley Street (Festival Hall), West Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Festival Hall from Dudley St.

There is simply no competition for the worst concert venue I have ever been to: Festival Hall wins by a mile. I've been to venues with worse organisation (looking at you, Auckland Town Hall and Stade de France), but for sheer dinginess, Festival Hall coasts to victory. Rightly dubbed "Festy Hall" or "Festering Hall" by Melburnians, this decrepit and dank hall is a stain on Melbourne's otherwise fantastic live music scene.

Stage door, Railway Place.

Now, many venues have access doors down alleyways that aren't exactly the most aesthetically pleasing places in the world. However, Festy Hall looks like it is surrounded on all sides by such alleyways, even on the wide open Dudley Street side. There is hardly an indication that this is a live music venue, or even that the place is still operational. Charlotte has never been to Festy, so when I first showed her my photographs of the place, she asked if it was some old and possibly disused factory. Nope, this is a live music venue that can hold up to 5,445 people - and if your band is too big to play theatres but not quite big enough to play Rod Laver or Hisense Arenas, this is about your only option in Melbourne.

Inside, it's not much better.  If you have the misfortune to be in the seats at the side, as I once did, you can enjoy all the thrills of watching a band through a tall plastic screen.  It's meant to separate the seated area from the standing floor, but in the end just makes you feel like you're watching a video on a grubby television.

Rosslyn St side, western end.

Festy's biggest claim to fame is hosting the Beatles in 1964, and I'm pretty sure it hasn't seen a lick of paint since. It doesn't have the character or mystique of most old venues; its walls don't ooze with stories of frenzied and chaotic live events; it doesn't even have the faded charm of a legend well past its prime. It's just a rambling, uninviting cavern with covered windows and peeling paint. It looks more like a prison or - as Charlotte noted - a disused factory than a vibrant centre of music. Normally music venues employ architects in the design phase, but Festy Hall's original developers clearly just skipped that.  If I weren't from Melbourne and my tour was booked here, I'd leave with a false impression that Melbourne's a pretty smelly city without much going for musicians.  Then again, hopefully this will work in our favour next month when Ke$ha plays here and she'll resolve to never again sully Victoria with her presence.

Rating: Damnable

72 Hope Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

Hope Street has yielded some bizarre and intriguing finds for us. We quite frequently walk down it late at night after gigs, when the undesirables are lurking in the alleys and the drunks are pissing in the stairwells of Walshe and Whitelock apartment blocks. On our slightly less perilous daytime walks down Hope Street, we had pointed out several dingy shops which, in our eyes, were quite clearly abandoned. I mean, some of these places  (which I'm sure we'll cover in later entries) actually look structurally unsound. 

However, things in the world of possibly condemned buildings are not always as they seem.

One night as we were walking home, I remember making a comment to the tune of "oh look, here's that awful abandoned shop, it's probably full of squatters". As we wandered by, I did a double take. Although I was convinced that this shop was last used since about 1960, the lights inside were on! From across the street, I peered through the oh-so-tasteful mouldering lace curtains. What I saw was even more confusing than the fact that people had apparently dared to enter this woeful hovel. Suspended from the ceiling were two objects of intrigue and mystery - a bicycle and a Chinese paper lantern. 

Who the fuck would be active in a dingy old shop at 12:30am with a bicycle and a paper lantern? I'm pretty sure I have the answer. Given Melbourne's high Italian population, I believe this is some kind of Mafia arts and crafts den. Well, can you think of anything more plausible? I don't know what's going on here, but I think I'd like to join in. However, the "enter at your own risk" sign on the front door kind of deters me!

When I was looking for the street address for this place, I noticed that the image on Google Street View is quite different to how it looks now. I believe the Google photos were taken around 2009. They show the shop with much less graffiti, and the "enter at your own risk" sign is absent. If this is anything to go by, the shop must have sat festering for some time before the arts and crafts bicycle people moved in. Still, at least it serves a purpose - it makes the nice house next door look even nicer by comparison. For god's sake, paint your shop and it might arouse a little less suspicion!

Google Street View image, markedly less graffitied.

Rating: Damnable

1017 Beach Road, Torbay, North Shore, New Zealand

It's time this blog featured an architectural failure, to complement the rundown and mysterious properties already here.  A few weeks ago, we paid a visit to the North Shore in New Zealand.  As a Wellingtonian, I feel better about my life and my relationship with the planet as long as I say I went to the "North Shore" instead of admitting I set foot in Auckland.*  However, I felt much worse about my eyesight and my relationship with architects the moment I set eyes on this monstrosity.  Trust me, the blurry photograph above is for the best; a nice, sharp one might do damage to your vision.

*Warning: sentence may contain high dose of exaggeration.

When we last passed through here, this was a vacant lot.  Now, as part of all the unnecessary development taking place along the fringe of Long Bay Regional Park, a house has cropped up here.  And not just any house, but a truly bleak, boxy piece of rubbish. Seriously, it looks like one box precariously balanced on top of another.  The colour is confronting, sinister, and about the last thing that should be beside a pleasant park.

The windows add to the sinister feel. Some walls have all too few, creating the impression more of light industry than of somewhere homely and inviting.  Others are just slits high on the wall, as you can see in this also mercifully blurred photo:

I cannot fathom what the architect was thinking, or perhaps more to the point, what gave him such a bad trip to design this or how he persuaded anybody to accept the design and build it.  The house itself is presumably perfectly liveable, so I can't award it one of our lower ratings, but I'm coming down on it like a sack of bricks - and maybe, if we're lucky, it'll be condemned not as structurally unsound but as aesthetically unsound.

Rating: Damnable, with a stern eye to Condemnation the moment any wear and tear develops.

10 Inverness Road, Browns Bay, North Shore, New Zealand

Woolworths Browns Bay

Once upon a time, this was a well-loved (if a little shabby) local supermarket. It had served the elderly community of Browns Bay (seriously, you only shopped there if you were 50 years old or older) for about 30 years, and is of particular interest to me considering that I worked there for two years. It closed down on the 28th of September 2008, and has very quickly fallen into a derelict state. As I understand it, the supermarket chain Progressive Enterprises held the lease on this place up until last year. Now, presumably, the lease has expired and this place is just sitting here dingily.

As of January 2011, the outside of the place is ... honestly not much different to what it was like when it was open, actually. The old Woolworths branding has been taken down, but the outline is still visible on the side of the shop. However, head around to the front entrance and things are quite different. One of the glass doors has been smashed, offering a tantalising glimpse into what used to be the checkout area. I saw that the old customer service desk (which was held together with tape when I worked there, incidentally) was still standing in a rather forlorn manner. 

Though the windows at the front of the shop were once covered in brown paper, it has fallen down over the years to reveal a very lonely old supermarket interior. All the old flooring has been pulled up, but the old signs for the meat counter and so on remain. We even spotted one of the old Woolworths trolleys, trapped inside and watching the world go by. 

Soon enough, I imagine this place will be pulled down and replaced by the same soulless high-rise apartments that are ruining most other seaside towns in New Zealand. I'm honestly not sure what would be more of an eyesore - at least the apartments will actually be useful. This thing is right in the middle of Browns Bay, for god's sake - you'd think prime land like that would have been snapped up by developers much earlier. Until then, however, I'll keep going past it every time I go back to New Zealand and wishing I could get inside. I'd love to check out the stockroom, since the windows are currently covered with old fuel discount posters, and I'd kill to get upstairs and check out the lunchroom and cash office. When I worked there, there was an old magazine in a drawer dating from the 1970s. I'd bet good money that it's still there. I could probably sell half of this stuff to the museum. 

Still, we must all remember that this place wouldn't have ended up abandoned in the first place if the bright sparks at Progressive hadn't decided to build another supermarket just across the road from it several years ago. That's in addition to the OTHER supermarket on the other side of town. A small beachside town does not require three supermarkets!

Rating: Damnable

377 Albion Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

To start this blog, here is a quintessential example of what Mow Your Lawn! is all about. It may not be the most ramshackle property we've seen, and it's not an architectural abomination, but it has so many of the classic qualities of a neglected, intriguing property.

Firstly, the lawn. Mow your lawn! There is just no excuse for a lawn being this overgrown. You can easily pick up a lawnmower for $50 on eBay and it'll use just a few precious moments of your weekend to make your house look presentable. If you aren't physically up to mowing a lawn, I sympathise, but if you can forego a couple of stubbies a week, you can get yourself a gardener to do it cheaply and quickly. Or even cheaper, put an annoying local child to good use behind their father's lawnmower for a ludicrously low amount of spare change.

Secondly, the incongruity of the house. The front looks neat enough – the paint isn't hopelessly dull or peeling away, in stark contrast to the lawn or to the miserable letterbox. So is somebody looking after this place? It's hard not to be intrigued. But if they are, well, you can't exactly get to that front door.

Thirdly, the neglected rear of the house. Through a gate that's just lazily resting open, you can see all kinds of stuff lying around at the back. Including a hose that's still connected. I'm just even more mystified. It's hard to tell if somebody's living here and has no sense of tidiness or lawnmowery, or if the property has – fairly recently – been left to fend for itself against nature and the triffids. Whatever the case, a bit of lawnmowery, some fence repairs, and a big old tidy-up could make this place a star on Albion Street.

Rating: Damnable.

So with our quintessential example established, join us to see more fascinating places from inner Melbourne and elsewhere, including a few forays to New Zealand.

Update (20 March 2011): The rating for this property has been revised down to Unpleasant after the lawn was mowed; see this entry for details.

Fire up your lawnmowers

Mow Your Lawn! is run by a Melbourne couple, which may or may not explain its geographic focus. After spending many suburban walks discussing the virtues and vices of the properties we passed, we thought it was about time we shared some of the worst offenders with the wider world. Now we don't mean to give the impression that we live in the middle of some kind of derelict slum - quite the opposite. An abundance of nice places have given us many ideas for the house we probably won't get to build for many years yet. However, dotted here and there through the neighbourhood like particularly persistent warts lie a number of properties which raise an inordinate number of questions. Does anybody live here? If so, how do they stand it? Is this a drug den? Was the architect both blind and mad?

What this blog is
This blog exists for the purpose of calling a spade a spade and a horrible house a horrible house. We mainly criticise buildings that have been poorly maintained, though architectural mis-steps are by no means omitted from our purview. I'd say that we don't mean to insult people's homes, but … that's actually the whole point, sorry.

Hey, that's my house!
Well, if you own it, then maybe you should do something about it. If you rent it, we know there may not be so much you can do (though if you're here for not mowing your lawn, MOW YOUR LAWN!), but your landlord should do something about it. Clearly your landlord sucks, eh? Though you probably didn't need us to tell you that.

Hey, I'm the landlord of that place!
So do something about it, you cheap prick. I know some landlords care about their tenants … I just haven't actually met one yet.

That's not a house!
Although our main focus is houses, we also feature shitty shops, office blocks, buildings of all descriptions – in fact any man-made structure. And Huntly. I recognise Huntly is just a force of nature for which nobody should be held responsible.

You snobby shits, looking down from your palatial mansion, why if I ever met you I'd-
Calm down. We have lived in at least two of the residences featured here.

It might be perfectly nice inside!
All the less reason for it to be so bad outside.

Care to explain your rating system?
It aims to strike a balance between clarity and precision:

Lick o' paint: Minor quibbles or sheer blandness. It's perfectly liveable, or if you were visiting you wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen there, but something could be done better.
Unpleasant: Whoever designed it or lives there should have known better. It's not outright offensive to the senses, and if you had no alternative you'd live or stay there with only minor qualms, but it really shouldn't be this bad in the first place.
Damnable: You'd rather not live or stay here, but it has redeeming features. If you bought it and did it up, it may look quite nice. Shame it's possibly condemned.
Condemnable: What the hell happened here? Whoever let this place get this way should be embarrassed. Let's just start again.
Cellar floor: Don't let the bottom of the barrel stop you.
Dot Dot Curve: We hope to god we never actually use this rating.

With that said and done, we invite you to come and join us on our charming suburban adventures. But watch your step, I think there might be some dry rot in the corner there.