... but this time with a pair of expensive new-builds and the CGI set to "turbo-bollocks".
Our previous two gems of the estate agent's art featured creative euphemisms for "surrounded by dense woodland and distinctly short on basic amenities" in the vicinity of Schloss Drew. This, also in Croydon, is different: we're moving to the brave newbuild world of 7-bedroom, 6-bathroom, 4,000 sq ft Executive Housing, smack on the A232 - a very busy main road that boasts five bus routes passing the front door sorry, good transportation links. Only smart CGI is good enough for these.
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| "... proudly occupying an enviable raised position" |
Looking nice, eh? As well they might be, this "grand opus of luxury living ... pinnacle of sophistication" is asking £1.7 million** for each. But look carefully: any sign of a garage or two for these upscale dwellings on a main road? Errr, that would be 'No': all you get is "Parking space - driveway" - and for the left-hand one, a very modest driveway it is, too, down the side: enough for just a single car by the looks of it, maybe two - in tandem - at a pinch. And a fine feat of reversing will be required for the one on the right, because the only road access is via the ramp on the left, and thence on up across the front of both houses. And this is for 7-bedroom houses, FFS.
Now: consider the access driveway ramp to that "enviable raised position". Nice broad gentle slope, fairly scenic? A gentle rise of 8 steps, past grass and bushes, for pedestrian access to the front door? Enough of the CGI, here's a photo of the thing taken today. That front retaining wall is an absolute necessity for the looming mound behind, especially over on the right where the number of steps is 12, not 8 (11 steps on the left). If anything that ramp off the main road is even steeper than it looks here: "pinnacle" indeed.
Errr, yeah, in summer when the leaves are out, if you confine your gaze to the street-side plane-tree top-cover. Otherwise, it's a procession of bright red double-decker buses.
The only saving grace, I suppose, is that folks always do their DD for a house purchase in person. Don't they ..?
ND
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** by way of calibration to local prices, £1.4m will buy you this, on the genuinely prestigious estate on the hilltop directly behind the above new-builds, but comfortably off the main road.
1930's: a bit dated but very solid build, these properties buff up beautifully for a couple of hundred grand: splendid garden: all on the level: backing on to a fine park: immaculate - check it out. And, errr, no shortage of parking!
Photo credits: the last pic is ShineRocks estate agents. If the copyright holder of the CGI confection above would like to be credited, just drop me a note in the comments and we'll be happy to name you.
24 comments:
" folks always do their DD for a house purchase in person"
May have mentioned this before, but a child shared a newish flat in Bristol with a Chinese student whose parents had bought it from HK. It was just off a nice square right in the centre.
Alas the square was hang out for half of Bristol's many alkies and druggies. When I visited there was actually an ambulance there doing resus on some unfortunate.
Entrance was down a dead end side road, and the only reason for being there was to get to the flats. "Wouldn't like walking here after dark" thought I.
Two months later parents bought ANOTHER flat further up towards the uni.
Ah yes, overseas "investment" buyers. Well, any attempt to sell these two white elephants off-plan has miserably failed: this development has been on sale for a year. £1.7m might be a bit more than the iffy Bristol flats
and Google Earth is a wonderful thing ...
No worry for Croydonites, Nick.
The people who MATTER are all moving to Bruton.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/the-cotswolds-alternatives/
Bruton is a weird island of chi chi and Yummy Mummydom in still resolutely Somersetian rural Somerset. Listen to our neighbours on both sides, both born within a few miles of here, and you might echo what a workmate of mine said, having travelled over to go with me to Newcastle University to fix a nasty problem on their library machine said, having heard me chatting to a newspaper seller outside the library when we left...
being .... "What language was that?"
Geordie, I told him. Not yet having met Lils, I was unable to expand on that, to note that Geordies are Scots with their heads kicked in, ergo incomprehensible. Even to Scots.
George Osborne moved to Bruton. I drive through it occasionally and was astonished that before his move, there were NO "Keep Osborne out" posters. I guess they like his type there...
Mentioning Bruton to a lovely lady, local lass, same age as me, who I garden for, and she wrinkled her nose...
'nuff said.
Yestreen I googled for a house I knew to be on sale in South London. Remarkably it turned up as the former address of a chap who served in the First German War. Google, however, did a poorer job of finding me the house and the estate agent. Eventually ...
The aforesaid estate agent had managed to do a thing that I thought astonishingly stupid. The mark he put on the little map of the area to show where the house was managed to obscure completely the commuter railway station that's just a couple of minutes walk away - which must surely be a major selling point for the house.
Why is everything being enshittified?
AI?
Stupid interns (unpaid)?
We stayed in a place near Wells last year where the posh cellist landlady had made her cash in the City and moved out - it seems that Frome is the lower-rent new Bruton. Perhaps more affordable for the non-Osborne set.
(Just outside Frome is the wonderfully named Marston Bigot)
OT but I do wonder if this is THE UA-China economic confrontation that was almost inevitable, but from the China perspective was worth putting off as long as possible, while the various factors also common to the UK continued to weaken the US.
Can't see either side backing down - interesting times.
US not UA
Did a single house in a semi-decent plot get demolished to build that pair of monstrosities?
I’m still in Somerset. Though moving away from the FROME Bruton set, towards Yeovil.
Yeovil is like Croydon.
In that it is THE major town. A diverse collection of everything, But lacks any of the charm of the surrounding villages.
The Victorian terraces in Yeovil that are rentals to students and immigrants would fetch £8-900,000 in the south east.
In Yeovil, around £400,000 for a six seven bed townhouse.
The new versions. Like ND has shown. Go for 5-600,000. Considered excessively overpriced.
I would complain about that there London coming down and buying up all the property and considering everything they see a ‘ complete bargain.wow..I should buy five or six of these..”
Or I would.
If I hadn’t done that myself, twenty years ago.
*sold our Somerset house for £500,000. 6 double bedrooms. 4 reception. Workshop and yard. Walled garden. Etc etc. No ceiling under 15th high. 1850s Victorian property. The table I took out, that always looked a bit small in the dining room, doesn’t even fit in the new dinning room.
The 3 bed semi in Surrey I sold to buy that country home, is worth £850,000 today.
World gone mad.
Yep.
The usual arrangement for houses along that road is a garage at street level, then stairs, or even in at least one case a lift (!), from the garage up to the house at the top. Nowhere else attempts that crazy driveway.
People who can't afford Bath move to Frome, which has direct trains to and from London.
Many moved from Bruton to Frome when a Steiner Academy was opened in Frome. House prices went up as these were richer people than locals. Lils and I got out of Frome just as it was starting to resemble an inland Totnes.
Marston Bigot. Like our village, listed in the Domesday Book
"Marston Bigot was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Mersitone-tora. The full name came into being when William the Conqueror gave the land to Robert de Bigod. It is now in the civil parish of Trudoxhill and includes the settlements of Gare Hill"
https://www.postleburychurches.org/st-leonards-church-marston-bigot/
Matth> Did a single house in a semi-decent plot get demolished to build that pair of monstrosities?
You got it there Matt. Zoom in on google maps shows 112 on one side and 116 on the other, on the even side of the road.
Google Earth history shows that the wider than usual plot had a lot of big trees, but with a house of similar size to its neighbours. Wonder if it is in a conservation area, and if so they got planning to cut down all the mature trees.
No, not a conservation area.
Conservative, yes! Let your google-earth drone roam around the estate to the south, bounded by golf course and park. Some fine art deco and arts-and-crafts architecture. As well as mock Tudor. And some impressive Grand-Design makeovers (£££ but not always taste in evidence)
>£££ but not always taste in evidence
Absolutely! I noticed the houses on Grimwade Ave abutting the park that had splashed out on building swimming pools in back gardens had all also entirely paved over their front gardens! Grim-Wade seems entirely appropriate.
But yes, the houses do look lovely.
Seems a bit odd they get a single yellow lines on both sides of Grimwade Ave and seemingly a CPZ when all the houses have oodles of parking space. But I guess they are the kind of voters who know how to lobby councillors to stop riff-raff commuters using the space, as you will well know I should think!
"buff up beautifully for a couple of hundred grand". There is the rub, having work done is horrendously expensive. Even at the bottom end £250/day is the common rate, more in London. Our local council did some roadworks - a few square metres of tarmac and paving slabs - no change out of £5mil. It's all the hangers on that cost the money.
Back in the day you could do an avocado bath suite, central heating, a kitchen extension and a paint job for about £6k. Less if you got out the tools and got busy. £200k got you half a street.
My builder relatives are making out like bandits, so much work around what with loft extensions, a bit out the back, drives and garages. But a big housing development - no way mate. Far too tiresome, the lawyers, consultants and agents take all the money and the bods on the tools get pushed around and stuffed.
The local traffic issue is Learner Drivers! It's exceptionally quiet during the daytime and the place is always heaving with them. For learning, it's almost like one of those old airfields marked out with painted roads + bollards.
At the same time, those roads aren't very wide. So a combination of a bit of parking + narrow roads + L-plates, and the place could get very snarled up.
Who'd be parking? Vans. People in houses like this consume a LOT of services, and they wouldn't generally invite White Van Man (or Care Company Nurse) onto the drive.
The whole thing is a very strange state of affairs. Prices in London's biggest borough attract a "Croydon Discount" (the bad rep for knifings etc in the north of the borough) - so a similar house in next-door Bromley would cost literally double, and in Kingston or Richmond, 3x.
This precise area (the Whitgift Estate) is, taken in isolation, as pleasant as can readily be imagined by suburban man & woman: 0.5 - 1.0 miles from East Croydon station, one of the best transport hubs in the country. But not a single retail premises actually on site: no litter, ne'er-do-wells, passing trade etc etc. There are sometimes odd goings-on in Lloyd Park - but even more cricket, tennis, golf etc; and the Park is huge - the doping and dogging corners are nowhere near. Burglars across those fences, of course, but that's been the way since the houses were built, and they are all fortified against that.
In between houses, we short term rented a property recently bought by people working in Europe, so they'd not done due diligence in person - around a year after we'd moved to our new home, and they'd moved into theirs it was back on the market.
Lovely place, lovely rural area, but being Grade 2 listed, was a beast to heat and needed a good amount splashing out inside. The pictures where from when some B list slebs had owned it. Ate north of 10k profits from house sale in three months, much to my wallet's dismay. More painful was I had another house, tenanted out, so couldn't make use of that.
Current house we did due diligence on, but my knowledge of building work being fairly lacking, I missed a lot of things.
On the positive side, being in Yerkshire, we spent over a million less then those cost, for 4 bedrooms/3 reception rooms in the main house, and an annexe, plus a garden you could build a small housing estate in.
OT - looks like Trump blinked, with the markets rebounding.
His complaints about countries (well, China) retaliating made me laugh too. Appropriately enough Cheap Trick's 'Surrender' was playing earlier.
Location, location, location....
We live in a first tranche council house in a lovely village. Built 1929, large rooms, big windows, large garden - Nick know is
Go two miles down the road to Coleford and you can b uy the same for half of the reasonable price you would pay her.
Why?
Well, you might not want to live in Coleford... t's got a good dash of that old school Somerset let's have a fight anyway MO...
We had our house DD'd by my father-in-law, who knew the trade. Here's one of his tips. Go to part of the house that is not on public display, e.g. the attic, and look at the quality of the brickwork. In our case it was top class: "good brickie, good builder", said the old boy.
There was one daft thing but that was the work of a previous owner not of the builder.
Friends of ours bought a similar house a few doors down the road. They eventually discovered that it had been built atop a natural spring. You could actually "dip" the depth of water under their dining room floor.
"wouldn't generally invite White Van Man (or Care Company Nurse) onto the drive"
Whyever not?
We think our well is actually under the staircase put in when the house was extended in the 80s - can't get at the area and I'm loth to rip up the stairs to have a look. Usually there's a cupboard under the stairs but this is solid brick or block.
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