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If Lily Allen’s new revenge album hasn’t already caused enough excitement among everyone I know — all right, among a significant majority of the women I know — her house coming on the market straight afterwards has finished us all off. Never has a real estate listing swirled around with such frenzied gawping as that of the five-storey Brooklyn brownstone that she and her estranged husband David Harbour have marketed at just shy of $8mn, more than twice what they paid for it almost five years ago.
Rather than house prices in Brooklyn having doubled (they in fact rose 34 per cent, according to US real estate agents Corcoran; 21.5 per cent in the immediate neighbourhood), this is in part because the house itself is a character on West End Girl, her new album which unfolds like the plot of a film to reveal the explosion of her marriage. Song by song, the lyrics reveal how things started to collapse from the moment they bought the “dream” property and got the interior designer Billy Cotton in. (He’s mentioned on track one).
By the fifth song, another woman has taken up home in their marriage. “I’m not convinced he didn’t f*** you in our house,” sings Allen, and because the listing is now live (at Compass, via celebrity go-to realtor Carl Gambino), many of us are wondering if such an event might just have occurred in the windowless pink bedroom that leads to the decadently carpeted turquoise bathroom? Or on the two-sided velvet sofa in the sitting room, that you can sit on facing different ways? Or perhaps in his tiny study, with its multicoloured flock wallpaper that looks like a 1970s carpet is climbing the walls? Or in the tiger print TV den?
Yes, we’re all enjoying an unhealthily parasocial interest in people we don’t know, but if you think this only happens when celebrities sell their homes, you are very much mistaken. As a long-term property nosy parker, I’m warning you now that if you put your house up for sale, half your neighbours and friends will be straight on to the estate agent’s listing, poring over the photos. Even if you’re not famous.
Once that for sale sign goes up — in fact, even earlier, because people in your area will have alerts set for properties on your street, or be registered with local agents for pre-market tips — people with no plans whatsoever to buy will be scrutinising. Britain might have long been described as a nation of homeowners, but we have now turned into a nation of home roamers. People far too polite to ask if they could pop in to see the kitchen extension their neighbour did in 2018 are now roaming around it, via their laptop, in glee.
And when it comes to relationships breaking down, people like me function as an early warning system. Our regular Rightmove patrols are conducted with the thoroughness of a military reconnaissance (my late grandfather, a brigadier, would have been proud), so if I note that a couple I know are selling, I’ll go through a mental checklist to see if they’re splitting up too.
If their children are, say, nine and 10 and currently in a good state primary in a borough with poor secondary options, well, that’s obvious — this family is moving for a better catchment area. If they bought in an area which has recently shot up in value but they’re financially cautious types — well, they’ll be cashing in to live mortgage-free elsewhere. But if I’m looking at a house that they have only just renovated, with the kitchen isthmus that was their compromise because he hated islands, the concrete floor she longed for but they argued over, the garden studio he insisted on, there’s nothing else for it: either someone’s been offered a job in Tokyo, or it’s divorce.
I recently found out an old media frenemy of mine had moved out of London — you can be sure I dropped that Sunday paper interview and flung her former address into Google at the speed of light. I was straight on to the sold section of the listings portals, poring over the sales photos that I had somehow (how?!) missed when her place was on the market. Her living spaces looked so bright and cheerful — far more bright or cheerful than she’d ever been — that I decided she’d had the place “staged” by a designer before selling it. Fake as ever! All fake! A piece of knowledge that gave me a deeply satisfying interlude between the Sunday papers and lunch.
Anyway, if you’re reading this thinking, well this woman is clearly a lunatic, nobody else is doing this, all I can tell you is that I’m the one admitting to it while millions of others are doing it in silence. Gazing at your floor plans. Totting up your square footage. Wondering how you managed all that time without a downstairs loo.
As for Allen’s husband, the only woman I’ve found defending him online is the tongue-in-cheek comedian Katie Hand in a social media video. “I think he was too overstimulated because of his house,” she deadpans, pointing at photos of the TV room, with its enormous couch covered in the same tiger print fabric as the rug. “How is he supposed to navigate the boundaries of his relationship,” she asks, “if he can’t even navigate the boundaries between his sofa and his floor?”
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