That was, until I looked at the property in Coogee.

It was the salmon mousse...

There’s a problem with chasing a suburb as a status symbol, namely that it’s not just you, there’s an ungainly horde of cashed up noveu riche aspirational bogans trying to snap up some bragging real estate. Every last cent that can be borrowed will be borrowed, just to get that house. Sadly this means that there is nothing left for tasteful refurbishment.  You might have to make some sacrifices.

“Salmon paint is on special? I’ll take a thousand litres!” says our aspirational bogan or colour blind new Australian as the case may be. Maybe you could splash a bit of green around to highlight the railings. Maybe you could gouge your eyes out with a spoon.

Let’s look inside though, firstly at the built in verandah. Why lumber yourself with a tasteful transition to the outdoors when you could create a long narrow sand coloured tomb with a pine ceiling made to endure the indignity of a walnut stain.

The indoors meets the... indoors

So they placed a country style setting (in pine no less!) in the sand sarcophagus. Ask yourself, would you take breakfast in that room? Or would you throw some soft toys in there and close the doors to create a child-aquarium for the amusement of guests? It’s not like you’re leaving them in a car with the windows up, well, not entirely.

Maybe you could throw Grandma in as well, as dementia and incontinence sets in, she’ll have no more idea of how to escape than she does of how to appropriately toilet herself. The sandstone effect tiles means you can just hose the whole affair out in the evening.

The evil of banality

Of course, for those times when social services pop around, you need more than just one room to store Grandma in her twilight years, but you still want the versatility of a hosable surface, nothing says low maintenance like lino flooring. Cane furniture gives the elderly a hobby in the form of endless dusting. There is nothing like cane furniture to suggest a rustic tropical get away in some plantation, you can complete this illusion in your own home, as these people have, with a black velvet painting. Contrast all of this with a harsh industrial look by putting steel girders into your home, contrast this further by using Grandma’s best Sunday bonnet as an upcycled light shade.

Recycle all of Granny's hats!

More girders, more hats as light shades. A non-ironic red recliner with little matching protective mats. Does the sweat of the elderly stain that badly? Or does it just linger with the scent of imminent death?

Beer bottle coloured wall lamps knowingly nod to Australia bogan culture of the 70s. An octagonal coffee table hints at the wildness of the owners in the 60s before they settled down to a grim Sydney suburban existence.

A horror in the key of "International Roast"

Did they start each morning with a cup of coffee, or simply an eye-full of coffee coloured bathroom? Most truck stop road houses take years, nay decades, to brew coffee as ugly as these walls. You can almost taste the bitter tang of regret as some wog patriarch looks at his hair collecting in the drain. These tiles reflect light in the same way our subconscious reflects our fears, it’s simply a nightmare. Like all nightmare existances, people tend to take refuge in escapism, maybe you drink, become a morphine addict, or maybe you join a cult.

You know the type of cult I mean, the one that would insist it’s not a religion, simply a gathering of friends and they have a secret handshake. Possibly they have a secret outfit too, like the moose head get up Fred Flintstone had.

Towing hats in a secret society are a no-no with these diminutive ceilings.

A few vinyl seats hint at a diminishing membership, picked off by prostate cancer and aged care facilities. One can imagine that this would have been quite the sought after location for meetings of the local cult for aged men. The bar would have been buzzing as perhaps as many as 40 men crowded together in the sweaty gloom. Sadly, without a trace of homoeroticism.

"Chinese Girl" sans irony.

The kitchen is a wooden number adorned with a print of the “Chinese Girl” by Vladimir Tretchikoff, a foray into hipster cool done completely without intention. It’s almost like Hellen Keller pulling off a copy of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” after she blew her nose on the curtains.

The whole thing speaks of a kind of desperation, an almost inability to go on with a reason to live. This house is the embodiment of the decay of the soul as suffered in suburbia. There’s a pool at the back without a fence, possibly the last ditch attempt to keep the grandchildren away, those little spectres of potential coming around each weekend to gloat about what they want to be when they grow up, as their grandparents silently muse if they’ll make it through the night.

One night they didn’t, and it was sold at auction. For how much? I no longer care.

The two letterboxes hint at the horror that awaits the discerning decorator, but more distracting is the giant green caterpillar / procession of triffids that are making their way to the top of the steps. Why would anyone do that? You’re not bringing the outdoors inside and you’re not leaving it outside either. Make your mind up. Maybe you could only afford a railing for one side? Here’s a tip, hand rails are easily affordable if you cut back on your giant black pot and ceramic lion budget.

This nature strip is so lack lustre; you have to wonder why they bothered. A punnet of small red bushes for “drama”, what looks like a couple of tired flax plants and an assemblage of weeds around a doubtlessly dripping garden tap, create a sense of urban hopelessness to rival any Russian housing project. Strangely enough there seems to be another letterbox in this picture. It’s white this time. Be afraid people, be very afraid.

A personal pet hate of mine is this driveway. I don’t think it would make it easier to get your car out (Oh, Darren is on a heroin binge right now, I’ll just reverse the car out instead) and it’s a great way to force rain water to rush down like a torrent across the already pathetic nature strip. Washing away your topsoil with gay abandon must be one of those ostentatious symbols of wealth I missed out on.

Let us now consider the gum lined street. Aside from the fact that the blue-grey foliage makes this look like one of the starting levels in “World of Warcraft”, there is also the problem that if there’s one thing a gum tree likes to do, it’s catch on fire. I look at these delightful Australian natives and I don’t see a picturesque and slightly exclusive suburb. I see a firestorm and the charred remains of a family trapped inside a Volvo who didn’t make their escape because their tires blew out from the heat, and a procession of triffids.

This horror of the exterior pales when compared to the travesty contained within. People, I cannot repeat this often enough, monochromatic is not automatically tasteful, and shiny is not automatically tasteful. Put them together and you have an interior guaranteed to cause spontaneous abortions amongst your pregnant friends and neighbours. The theme du jour of this suburban palace is “metallic women holding stuff”. I count ten of them, and a bloody great metal swan too. For every three metallic women there is one chandelier, which seems quite generous. Decorating tip #2 Chandeliers are a sometimes food, like donuts or rendered pig lard. Putting one in every room doesn’t make you stylish or grand; it makes you repetitive and unimaginative.

I’d like to think that the curtains are an attempt at a post-feminist lesbian nod towards the metallic vulvic mysteries of the metallic women who inhabit every corner and surface of this room. The reality though is they probably thought that the shiny fabric looks expensive (but not when it’s on every surface) and the masses of draped fabric suggest a generous luxury (but not when you have meagre 7 foot ceilings). This room reached towards grand and instead fell short and ended up as cluttered, and remarkably tacky, and abortion inducing.

Aside from the fact that the statue in the foreground suggests a love of female anal penetration, or possibly a desire to throw naked women into quicksand, this picture demonstrates a number of classic mistakes. Too much gold, shitty bric-a-brac on pedestals, vases on floors, Doctor Who props hidden under chairs, overdone drapery, monochromatic colour schemes and ugly statues all collide together in a visage of hellishly bland Canberra living.

Another foray into female anal penetration, some women holding stuff and a deliciously piss weak oil painting. I can imagine the back story of this piece; a recently divorced friend has decided to honour their inner goddess by expressing an artistic streak that hasn’t got a look-in since a senior art class in the 80s. One TAFE course later and suddenly friends with money and no taste are nailing that crap to the wall. “It’s a circus! Life’s a circus! I realised that after Jason and I divorced and I got the beach house on the NSW north coast!” It’s not art, it’s a travesty.  The other blue seaside painting is decoration without artistic merit, unless of course you consider the fact that it was probably produced by a child in a sweat shop in Asia before it found its way into a tasteless middleclass Canberra abode.

White couches and ornate decanters on the sideboard proclaim “I’m very clean” but probably indicate that they hire an international student from an exotic locale who is working on a cure for cancer, when they’re not removing dark coloured lint from the white couch. The gothic candle stick holders are totally unusable unless the international student/cancer researcher/cleaner also removes scorch marks off the ceiling and resets the fire alarm. More likely, the hosts use tea light candles unaware of the gaucheness of such a manoeuvre.

The bedroom is meant to suggest luxury with its shiny window treatment, golden picture frames, foot stool and chandelier. However the effect is spoiled by the impractical use of tall lamp tables as bedside tables. There are no drawers in those tables. When the hell am I supposed to put my water based lubricant, prophalactives and tasteful white hand towel? In the foot stool? The devil is in the details though; the complete lack of a head board though leaves no doubt that this is less of a castle and more of a crack house, as is every third house in Canberra.

“We bought her very first painting” they boast “it’s called ‘feminist fantasy in purple’ and it really brings life to the den!” Bullshit. It’s like a “my little pony” decided to vomit up a storm, or possibly the blood splatter pattern from a cabbage patch kid. In front of it, is the requisite naked lady holding something. Considering her bum is exposed I’m surprised she’s not facing the other way. Maybe she couldn’t bear the purple horror either.  The asymmetric zebra couches make me suspect that this home is owned by someone who is either blind (it would explain the pornographic statues) or someone trapped in an 80s psychosis.

Two kitchens, I knew it! This palace was at one stage flats. No matter how big and golden your picture is, you cannot disguise the fact that some poor bastard is expected to cook on an electric stove. I suppose I should be grateful that it has four burners.  The white horror kitchen leaves nothing to the imagination, if you wanted to know what it would be like to be crushed to death in a glacier, then this is the kitchen for you. The uncomfortable looking white chairs in the kitchen cry out for a chandelier or three, but instead have to settle for more bric-a-brac on gold and glass display shelves. So if you have $2.5 million and are legally blind, maybe this is the house for you. If you have any taste or human compassion, or maybe you just think copper based anal pornography is wrong, then we at pinksheep salute you.

Godwin isn’t afraid to limit his bad judgment to politics, heavens no! Not when there’s an entire house to decorate. His taste can best be described as “horrible” with a nod to “Australian ethnic comedies of the 1970s”. Take for instance what appears to be his dining room. Nothing says informal like the complete absence of chairs. You might think that’s a bold decorating decision, but it’s carefully balanced by the abundance of gold molding and 8 clocks. Yes there is, count them! This room says “taste” and possibly mumbles “in my arse” after, and who are we to argue with magnolia walls and a cheeky little chandelier. This is a house which says “I’m a civil servant, and I’ve made it!”

Now on one level I hope Godwin is a fellow faggot, in order to justify the Sistine Chapel print above the bed, on the other hand, I can’t imagine Godwin being gay and having such appalling décor. Such a subdued setting demands the restraint of four golden cherubs and another chandelier in the walk in wardrobe. Notice how the neutral tones are repeated in the bathroom with a witty little garden statue staring at the poor soul in the shower.

In comparison the kitchen is almost appealing, despite the use of a suspicious lens by the real estate agent to make it appear more master-chef than hells-kitchen. However tasteful is easily fixed with some lace curtains, a series of questionable ceramic figurines of rotund ethic chefs (it looks just like you!) and another god damned clock. The caption to this picture originally boasted that it was a solid wood kitchen. Does that mean it would burn nicely? Painting it white and getting new handles is a simple way of freshening up this kitchen, sealing it in concrete is another.

The lounge room doubles as a monument to impracticality. White couches seem to suggest “I’m very clean”, but in practice scream “I never use this room” and “I use a lot of scotch guard”. A tired nylon rug playful trips anyone foolish enough to answer the standard Telstra issue plastic phone.  I dare say the problem with plastic is that it won’t hold onto gold paint, unlike the seven cherubs or clock in this room. Outdoor living is brought inside with the addition of two garden statues. Most disturbing of all though are the spot lights all focused on the spot to the left of the television. One can only assume this abuse of task lighting was the response to a lovers’ tiff about the location of a remote control.  I do admire the attempt to soften office vertical blinds with a ruffled pelmet and a couple of tied back curtains in a shade that perfectly matches the wall; because nothing says “classy décor” like colour matching OCD.

Here we have a second dining room, which confuses me; because who has so many parties that they need to rotate through two rooms? Maybe high flying civil servants do. This room isn’t afraid to let people finally sit down, but you’ll have no fear of lingerers with eight clocks in the room. They haven’t moved these clocks into the room for the shot, they are eight completely differerent clocks, and the table only seats six! A smattering of angels and chandeliers completes this effortlessly tasteless look that makes overpriced look very cheap.

Godwin, if you read this, I hope the auction goes well; and I hope you’re never allowed to buy furniture or accessories again. We know what sort of dark places your décor has taken you to in the past.