A real estate translation guide

Besides critiquing whatever properties - for good or bad - catch our eye, one of our favourite past-times here at MYL is to flick through real estate magazines and have a right old laugh at some of the shonky claims and horrendous writing. In the spirit of this, here is my guide to what the blurbs really mean, because if we know one thing about real estate agents, it's that they are full of shit and often are paid to hock off houses that they think are a total load of shit.

What they say: "Under instructions from state trustees."
What they actually mean: Somebody died here. The curtains, wallpaper, and carpet date from about the same year as Cliff Richard and are even more undesirable. James May probably has a shirt that looks like this house's interior, but unlike James May, the house can't quite get away with it any more.

Bet when 39 Barry St comes up for sale, it'll be a "renovator's delight"!

What they say: "Exciting options to renovate", "renovator's delight", "so much potential", or any variation upon this theme.
What they actually mean: It's shit. It's so shit that the agent can't even think of an admirable quality to highlight.


What they say: "Continuously owned by the same family since [any decade prior to the Cold War]."
What they actually mean: We're sorry about the hideous carpet and all the wares and keepsakes and generic knick-knacks that will undoubtedly catch your eye during the open home.

What they say: "In a league of its own", "something different", and "a rare opportunity".
What they actually mean: Just like everywhere else. We're pretending it's unique so that you'll be interested.

What they say: "Feature wall."
What they actually mean: We're trying to re-cast the most architecturally abhorrent aspect of this place as something somehow desirable and exclusive.

176 Barkly Street, St Kilda, VIC, Australia

Back in the day when I was a poor undergrad student, I looked at quite a few properties in the desperate quest to find somewhere cheap, inexpensive, and in a vaguely decent location (emphasis on "vaguely"). I looked at some pretty horrendous properties in that time. It's amazing what real estate agents and landlords get away with asking for properties just because they happen to be a couple of blocks from a mediocre beach or across the road from a railway station or happen to fall within the formal boundaries of a poncy suburb. But 176 Barkly St takes the cake for being the single worst - and single most memorable - property I had the displeasure of setting foot in on this entire quest.

Oh-so-inviting entryway, where you can be bashed in seclusion.

I wish I could show you inside.  If the pictures of the exterior make you think it looks reasonably dank and dingy, you're on the right track. It's just so dark on the inside. Some rooms looked like a ray of sunshine had never once passed through the window; it was a bright spring day outside, but I felt like I was in England on a stereotypically drizzly winter's day. I remember the rooms at least seemed to have fairly high ceilings, a quality i quite like, but otherwise ... sweet jesus, the floorboards and the aged walls were dark enough to emphasise the drab, soulless feel, and the fittings in the kitchen and bathroom looked barely hygienic and barely functional. The sort of fittings that, in general, had disappeared before the Soviet Union did.

One of the windows has recently gained a tag. Charming.

On the outside, well, the design betrays a lack of imagination. The graffiti scrawled on the window actually somehow adds to the building, that's how meaningless and drab it is. There was graffiti by the entryway that stayed there for years - although gone now, it lasted a good couple of years at least. The landlord clearly had little concept of maintenance. The fact the building was so clearly vandalised was just a reminder that in such a miserable and dark corner of St Kilda, you too were likely to be vandalised on your doorstep. Especially on a Friday night. This building is literally just around the corner from the happenin' block of Acland St, and that is why the real estate agent was asking ...

... wait for it ...

I can understand why it's hidden behind trees! Bonus ugly building at left.

One hundred and eighty dollars a week for this stinking sack of shit. There's a pub a few houses down, a supermarket right across the road, you're about two minutes from one tram line and two minutes from another, strolling to the Palais Theatre or Luna Park is effortless, and it's just another minute on to one of the most crowded beaches in Melbourne come a sunny weekend. Yet even if that sort of location sounds awesome to you (I find St Kilda a bit crowded and commodified myself), you'd spend every day living there overcome by a feeling of being utterly ripped off. It's highway robbery to demand $180 for somewhere unfit to house a dog. Actually, I don't like dogs and would quite happily house a heap of them there, but I'm a twat.

Google Streetview, prior to demolition.

The good news, as the pictures show, is that the place seems to have been gutted and is in the process of demolition, or at least a much needed rejuvenation. I hope it's the former, because even if you completely rebuilt this thing inside, I'm pretty sure there is a forcefield across the windows that prohibits sunshine from entering.

Rating: Condemnable and can't be torn down soon enough.

243 Mansfield Street, Thornbury, VIC, Australia

When I first came across this place, my immediate reaction was to rip into it for being another ridiculous example of the modern architecture I hate so much. However, that was a little while ago, and I've had time to think about it and realise that for once, I might not be writing a hate-filled rant about something modern.

Yes, it's a funny shape. It's painted in colours more suited to a Teletubbies set. It doesn't have a roof. It has racy angles all over the place. It shouldn't work! But it a weird way, it's actually kind of endearing. I mean, I would be pretty happy to live here. With the right maintenance, those bright colours will stay bright and attractive (now I sound like a washing powder advert), and let's face it, no-one would ever get lost looking for your house. The only trace of mushroom-coloured paint lies around the front door, on a surface which looks troublingly like corrugated concrete from a distance. Still, that is a much better effort than pretty much all the other new places around here have made - generally, the only deviation in their "mushroom" paint scheme is a nice stripe of black or brown. I'm very impressed.

To be honest, I think the biggest flaws with this place are not with the house, but with the garden. Firstly, that fence has to go. Sure, it's not quite as bad as those fences around here that look like level crossing barriers, but it's pretty bland all the same. It looks more like a barrier at the side of the road to stop unruly children dashing out into the traffic than a tasteful residential fence. And the garden needs some serious work. It's bright enough as it is, but some nice flowerbeds would ensure that this thing could be seen from space! The trees on the left need a serious trim - surely if you're going to paint your house that bright, you're going to want people to see it. Still, unlike the flaws you find in most modern places, these things are all very easily fixed. Perhaps when this place gets leased, the new tenant will fix it up a little.

For the first time in the history of Mow Your Lawn, I am quietly optimistic about a modern place. A truly momentous occasion.

Rating: Kind of quirky but not too offensive, really. Probably equates to a lick o' paint.

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.

305 Albion Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

Update, 28/11/2014: We have received concerns that some comments on this entry are defamatory of individual Walshe & Whitelock agents. Comments with defamatory content have been deleted. This blog is no longer actively monitored, so we have chosen to close comments to avoid the possibility of further defamatory comments. We apologise for this; if you have an opinion you wish to share on Walshe & Whitelock's business practices, please post it on your own blog or Google Reviews or elsewhere - and make sure you don't defame anybody!

If you're a regular reader of this blog (and if you're not, why not?) you will almost certainly be familiar with the concept of "Walshe and Whitelock" by now. For those who may not be, it is the name of an estate agent that always seems to be hocking off the most miserable properties, which are usually massive, made of bricks in that awful 1960s brutalist style and have about as much character as a dog turd on the pavement. They usually provoke a similar reaction to a dog turd on the pavement, in fact. Anyway, I thought I'd seen my fair share of Walshe and Whitelocks around here. I almost thought I was becoming desensitised to them. Then we stumbled across this quintessential example of hideousness on Albion Street.

The picture possibly makes it look better than it really is.

This thing embodies the Walshe and Whitelock stereotype to the most ridiculous extent. Everything that could be potentially wrong with it IS in fact wrong with it. First off, the design (or lack thereof). Enough red bricks to last a lifetime? Check. Complete lack of a roof to cap off the "shoebox" design model? Check.  Crappy attempt at adding variation with the white bricks around the windows? Present and correct. Something this soulless shouldn't be allowed to exist, especially in an area which is otherwise most aesthetically pleasing. With regards to the right hand side of the house, I would usually say something like "chop down your trees!" But in this case, the massively overgrown vegetation is more of a blessing than a curse. At least I only have to look at half of it this way. I feel sorry for the residents on that side though - we all know Walshe and Whitelock properties are known for their dinginess, and this shrubbery over their windows would exacerbate this tenfold.

Security entrance! Central courtyard!

Now, you see that open door there in the middle? That's another one of Walshe and Whitelock's famous "security entrances", as seen previously in this entry. It is always open, even in the depths of winter and in the middle of the night. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure there is a door there to close in the first place. It would make sense given Walshe and Whitelock's general stinginess. It would be very easy to get in here, and judging by the abundance of mailboxes, there would be a great variety of places to rob. That's if any burglar can bring themselves to set foot in this place, though. Even burglars have standards.

The middle of the complex seems to open out onto a courtyard of some sort. Judging by what we can see in these pictures, that certainly doesn't look like somewhere I'd like to spend my afternoons. The balcony that faces it looks mouldy and possibly structurally unsound,  too. I bet it was some optimistic attempt at a garden or some other feature, which lasted about a day and then degenerated into weeds and muck. In fact, I'm probably being optimistic. It's probably just where they keep their rubbish bins.

What's behind the trees? You don't want to know.

There shouldn't be any excuse for this. Seeing places like this just depresses me, so I can't even imagine what it must be like to actually live in one. Are people really this desperate? I guess so, given the exorbitant amounts that Walshe and Whitelock get away with charging for the rent. They know that they can offer a tiny, boxy, dark apartment that hasn't seen a paintbrush or even a duster this side of 1970, and some poor student will still settle for it at $300 a week. In addition to that, it breaks my heart to think what lovely Victorian home stood here before the developers massacred it in the 1960s. The only redeeming feature I can pick about this place is that at least it's used. Can you imagine how many thousands of times worse these places would look if they were abandoned? I'm dreading the day that I come across one. They wouldn't even be interesting to explore given the total lack of thought given to the architecture.

Still, at least it has windows (unlike some modern places) so that you can look out and see what you're missing.

Rating: Condemnable; should be illegal.

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.

60 Keilor Road, Essendon North, VIC, Australia

I don't really want to be seen as an architectural luddite, and nobody needs an architectural equivalent of those "rock music died in 1975!" people. There are some examples of older architecture I am by no means fond of, and they will end up on this blog sooner or later. However, so many of the new developments going up around Melbourne are decidedly unappealling, and many of the popular trends do a good job of raising my ire. Today's target is a good example of many silly ideas in small apartment blocks you can find in the inner and middle suburbs.

I honestly just feel like very few people are even trying now. This building has a number of nitpicks that together combine into a more substantial irritation.

Maybe it actually is structurally unsound.

Firstly and most significantly, THE SLANT. It doesn't have a roof as such, but the upper ceiling is on a slight lean. As are some bits on the side. Do they WANT to give the impression of poor structural integrity? Look, don't hint at the slant of a roof; build an actual damn roof rather than yet another flat-topped (or slightly-slanted-topped) building that resembles a shipping container more than it resembles somewhere people would actually want to live. I can think of few more substantial architectural sins than depriving a house of a nice, well-angled roof. At least if you go somewhere like Switzerland, winters tend to dictate a nice sloped roof, regardless of what else you do to the house.

Beyond that? Well, does the number need to be THAT gigantic? You'll never forget where you live, at least. OK, so that's really petty. However, I would like to point out the silliness of the balconies. On the side, where it's extremely difficult to see in, the balconies have railings (or walls) so gigantic that they actually look more like an electrical switchboard locker than somewhere to go chill outside. Meanwhile, up the front, where everybody on a busy road can merrily see in, you have low balcony railings to aid in that voyeuristic quest. Hmm, got that round the wrong way, huh!

I'd be selling up too. They forgot to mention that the building's hideous.

And in general, I find buildings like this to be monumentally unappealling. They're dime-a-dozen boxes with basic paintjobs that lack detail, just templates and bare surfaces slapped together to be functional rather than appealling. Once upon a time, buildings of any decent size were civic statements; now developers can't throw apartment blocks up fast enough, and anything that isn't absolutely necessary to its structural integrity is jettisoned as an "optional extra" rather than constructing a building that will actually age well and possess dignity decades down the track. And then that's compounded by the tokenistic attempts to try to airbrush away its cookie-cutter functionalism by placing a basic necessity at a slightly unusual angle to that it's A BIT different from everywhere else (i.e. giving the flat top a bit of a perplexing slant) or throwing off-cuts at the building instead of taking the effort to dump them (as in the case of the inexplicable poles at 7 Bent Street). You're not fooling anyone. We know you just want people to hurry the fuck up and move in so that you can move on to your next charmless, hastily designed and even more hastily erected money pit of apartments.

And yet it's probably got all the mod-cons inside and is very liveable. At least when you're inside, you don't have to look at it!

Rating: Unpleasant.

48-50 Evans Street, Moonee Ponds, VIC, Australia

Moonee Ponds is probably my favourite suburb around here. It's brimming with beautiful Victorian-era houses, colourful gardens and friendly neighbourhood cats.  We usually walk there from our place, for all the aforementioned reasons. On this walk, we cross Citylink (using a footbridge that is far less creepy than this one). As we cross, we first see a nice panorama of rooftops belonging to lovely old places. Then, we see this.

Glorious iron desert, stretching on for miles. Note real houses in the background.

This thing is unforgivable. In the world of Walshe and Whitelock turds, this is the biggest, most steamy turd of them all, and we have to smell it every time we walk to Moonee Ponds. Gloriously situated next to the massive sound barrier alongside Citylink, it is a truly depressing place to live. The block is huge - there are at least 15 apartments in it, probably more. It ticks all the wrong boxes - no roof, awful brickwork, tiny windows and from what I've seen through the tiny windows, dank rooms that look as if they haven't been decorated since 1962. Some residents will be lucky enough to have a glimpse of the Moonee Ponds Creek through their tiny windows. The worst thing is that the agent is probably charging hundreds of dollars per month for this shitbox, ripping off innocent international students and old people who can't afford anything nicer.

Tiny windows, but all they have to see is a huge sound barrier.

What drugs are these developers on?! They could have at least built many small units. That wouldn't have been so horribly confronting. Perhaps - and I know this is an absolutely insane proposal - they could have actually given this place a roof and some features which aren't horrible. But no, this edifice takes up a massive lot and everybody in the surrounding streets has to look at it every day. If I had the misfortune to live here, I'd tint the windows of my car so no-one would see me as I left or came home. Nobody should be ashamed of their place, but in this case I can't see how you'd be anything but mortified.

The turd in all its glory.

This thing is so big that it can probably be seen from space. From above, it puts me strongly in mind of a factory, or perhaps a prison. I feel sorry for the poor cyclists who ride over Citylink on the Hope Street bridge, spot this and fall off their bikes in horror. At least as a pedestrian I can prepare myself for what's coming.

Panoramic views of footbridge and sound barrier!

I know it's pretty hard to polish a turd, but they could have at least tried. Shame on you, 1960s developers, shame on you. I hope that when you die, your hell is a never-ending maze of huge soulless brick apartments, and I hope that the residents of this place come to haunt you with awful corrugated iron roofs and monotonous brickwork and entranceways with a whiff of urine about them.

I think the lawn needs a mow, too. I like the bush covering the window.

One slightly redeeming feature? At least they made an attempt at putting eaves over the upper windows. At least it breaks the monotony a tiny little bit. But that still doesn't raise the rating of this place. Sorry.

Rating: Cellar floor

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

460 Albion Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

The drug house was for sale for a very long time. Wonder why?

Brunswick West does have a lot of nice places. It really does. But you can never quite get rid of properties like this, loitering incessantly like a bunch of underage youths outside a liquor store. This place is probably just as dirty, but a hell of a lot more fascinating. Like many of the properties around these parts, we initially thought this one was most definitely abandoned. It looks as if it hasn't been painted since it was first built - and if you think the front looks bad, you should see around the sides and the back! There are a couple of outbuildings which I believe were once a shed and garage. Both are now falling to pieces and literally unrecognisable. So, who in their right mind would actually live here? Nobody, right? WRONG.

Complete with nice car.

We had taken to calling this place "the drug house" due to to the fact that we would quite often see very nice cars parked incongruously in the driveway. We assumed that nobody would have a car that nice and a house that shitty, so we naturally jumped to the conclusion that the falling down shed out the back was actually a sophisticated hydroponic setup. Mystery solved! We would smirk knowingly to ourselves as we wandered by, sure that we had uncovered yet another house of illicit wares. However, as always, things were to take a surprising turn.

One day around Christmas, we were lucky enough to be walking past the drug house when the front door was open. Up until this point, we had never had so much as a glimpse inside, since the curtains are always drawn. But today we were in luck. One of the very nice cars that we had been seeing regularly was outside, and there was a couple who appeared to be dropping a few things off at the house. But here's where the shock set in - this decrepit, falling down heap of turds is actually furnished. It would appear that despite all evidence to the contrary, people actually live here. I'm not just talking about a couple of garden chairs here, either. I'm talking large sideboard (complete with mirror and Christmas decorations), reasonably well-kept floorboards, bookcases and soft furnishings.

The original ad for the drug house.

This is bizarre in the extreme. The place had actually been advertised for sale up until just a few days ago when the sign disappeared. Given that they were asking over a million dollars for the site (they pretty much said "just knock this place down and build massive apartments"), I'm not surprised it hasn't sold. Still, this place didn't look too bad inside. If someone has been living there over a long period of time, why the hell haven't they done ANYTHING to the outside? People would probably be interested in this place if it was fixed up - it's a pretty big house on a full section. A clever estate agent would be able to get close to a million for it quite easily. But no, it's been left to fester and now nobody even wants the land it stands on. I'm not surprised; that shed probably full of cockroaches and rats and used syringes. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

Rating: Condemnable

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)

6 John Jennings Drive, Albany, North Shore, New Zealand

Many years ago, I moved into a suburb called Torbay, on the very outskirts of Auckland's North Shore. If you drove a little way down the road, you would enter the tiny village of Albany. To get here, you would drive down what was little more than a dirt track named Oteha Valley Road snaking through sparse fields. Nothing really happened there - apart from the orchards, the thing that Albany Village and surrounds was well-known for was its vast chicken population.

These days, things are very different. People actually refer to the place as "Albany CBD", there's a gigantic and soulless Westfield shopping mall, the bars and cafés are many, the architecture is non-existent. It's a bustling hub, unrecognisable from what it was in the mid-1990s. I blame this largely on the Northern Motorway extension, which was built in 1999 and connected the isolated Albany to the rest of Auckland. When this happened, Oteha Valley Road was rapidly transformed. They had to actually seal it and make it into a proper four lane road, to allow for the flow of traffic on and off the motorway. When this happened, little shops and houses started springing up all along the road, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing at first. But shortly after that, the inevitable mass produced housing developments were built alongside the road. This line of eyesores was one of the first. While it is not technically ON Oteha Valley Road, it might as well be - it casts a great ugly shadow over the entire road.

Clearly funding was very, very low at the time, since they've actually had to build these houses from balsa wood. Seriously, I'm astounded that they're still standing more than 10 years later. The walls are about two centimetres thick - they look like they would fall down if you so much as slammed your door. In addition to that, I have much respect for the residents of these houses for being able to find their way back to their house each day. They all look exactly the same. If I lived there, I dread to think how many times I would have tried to go into my neighbour's house after a long day at uni.

There is absolutely no excuse for this. These days, Oteha Valley Road has many housing developments, but at least with the other ones they tried a little bit. At least they look as if they took more than a day to build. At least they're actually made out of housebricks rather than something you would find in a hobby shop to make model aeroplanes. I'm really not sure what has the least amount of charm, these houses or the ugliest Westfield shopping mall in Auckland which resides a little further down the road. Both served to ruin a little bit of Albany - the mall by taking away the business of many small independent shops close by, and these houses by simply being a crime against humanity.

These houses can never be saved. Just bomb the entire site and start again, please. Don't make me look at these block of mushroom-coloured death and sadness any longer. Still, at least now the shrubs along the retaining walls have had a chance to grow and at least partially shield these houses from the eyes of innocent drivers. Oh, and they don't have real roofing either. What looks like a pointed roof from the front isn't really, it's just a facade. Just another thing to make these places look even more like badly painted stage props.

Rating: Condemnable

194 Dawson Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

Or, "how Mow Your Lawn! got its name".

It was 31 December 2010 and time for that annual celebration when the entire planet joins weirdos like me and Charlotte to be number nerds and celebrate something as basic as one number changing to another. I mean, I think interesting dates are a perfectly good reason to get drunk and set off fireworks, and it's comforting that once a year, everybody else joins in.  What, you're telling me there's a bit more to it than that, something called "culture" and all that?  Oh, well then.  That's not the point!

The point is that, on this particular New Year's Eve, Charlotte and I were going to meet my mother and her partner for dinner.  Classy souls that we are, we got smashed on delicious cider before even getting out the door.  So we stumble onto the tram, and I'm trying not to be one of those obnoxious, overly loud tram drunks talking about totally inappropriate subjects (cf Charlotte when we took Helen to see Alpine in November).  I don't think I entirely succeeded.

We already had some budding curiosity about decrepit buildings and crankiness about shonky modern architecture.  See, for example, this post and another post on this topic from Charlotte's blog.  On this particular trip, we'd already - and fairly quietly - noted a couple of Melville Road's more curious places (like Gibbi's Pizza and the shop next to Con's).  But then the tram pulled onto Dawson Street, I laid eyes on #194, and blurted:

"Mow your lawn!"

Because, christ, this thing really does need a mow, soon.  The property is otherwise lovely, and with a nicely mown lawn would attract a considerable amount of approval from me, not that this hasty shot shows much beyond the overgrown lawn:

I spent the next ten minutes critiquing unmown lawns and even urging one concrete paradise to "get a lawn!", which just made me think of a line from the Late Show's sketch about things wogs would never do.  Charlotte finally forcibly got me to shut up, or perhaps it was the urgent call of my bladder, parlously overloaded with cider.

Anyway, all I was getting at that night, and all I'm getting at now, is that you should mow your lawn.  You can't do a whole lot on an unmown lawn (except pass out in it, or hide power bills you don't want to read), and it's probably going to wind up home to things that want to kill you.  Especially in Australia.  And since this country is only three quarters of a mile from the sun, it's a bushfire risk too.

Rating: MOW YOUR LAWN!, or on our oh-so-formal scale, "lick o' paint".

185 Blyth Street, Brunswick East, VIC, Australia

For this entry, I thought I would shift the focus from derelict old houses to the worst of modern architecture. Behold, the luxurious new model of garden shed! Big enough for the whole family!

What kind of awful drugs was this "architect" on when he decided that corrugated iron shouldn't just be restricted to the roof of the house? In this case, they appear to have done away with the roof altogether. Having a roof on your house is so last century, don't you know? The stylish object to base your house around these days is in fact a shoebox.

Seriously, everything about this house is unappealing. Apart from perhaps the cheery red door, but the utter hideousness of the rest of it somewhat negates that. The boxy shape, the harsh lines, the truly awful windows that look like the architect just couldn't find a pane of glass the right size and so instead had to use a lot of smaller ones for a piecemeal effect ... the list just goes on and on. Oh, and the proportion issues - that garage is probably the same size as the house itself. If they don't watch out, Walshe and Whitelock will come and start renting the garage out to foreign students at $400 per week. You could fit at least six people in there and call it "cosy".

It's really something when even the abandoned shop next door to you looks more appealing than your house. At least the shop is intriguing and makes me want to go inside. The house, on the other hand, just makes me want to set my eyes on fire. I guess someone liked their modern office block so much that they decided to live in it. And of course, you know what really helps to add to the appeal of a house? A really nice fence. Preferably a wooden or stone one. This house fails almost as hard as possible when it comes to fences. That belongs at a railway level crossing to control pedestrians, not in front of a suburban home. However, at least it's not one of those godawful common wire netting fences that you see around school playgrounds and in front of houses in South Auckland. Clearly this house can still sink to further depths!

Oh, and for the record, the picture at right shows what used to be here. Even though behind all that greenery it looks pretty dingy, at least it's readily recognisable as a house. With a lick o' paint and some serious garden work, it could probably be quite a nice one. Instead, someone just couldn't be bothered and knocked it down and replaced it with an upmarket tool shed. Just another way to make me lose even more of my faith in humanity!

Rating: Condemnable

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.