For Sale: Nick Cave’s House of Horror
Dreaming of living in a nightmare? Now’s your chance. The high-end musician-designer couple Nick and Susie Cave have listed their seaside Brighton home for £3.25 million. The duo have long been draped in luxe fashion, from Nick’s Gucci suits to their Met Gala 2018 looks and Susie’s royally worn fashion brand, The Vampire’s Wife. Susie’s traditional and prairie-style dresses had primed expectations that the pair’s home should keep to such tastes. It does when it comes to simplicity, but the pictures of the house show that the design looks stunted, halfway done, snapped in two like the victim of a Bad Seeds song.
Should this have been expected? Nick Cave may perform songs such as “Stagger Lee” and “White Elephant” with enthusiasm, but such is the life of an artist, a writer. I echo my past English teachers when I say it’s important to remember that the speaker and writer are not the same. Yet, seeing his bright, oft-bare amoxicillin walls, I realized I was wrong: This is a madman. For a home is not just art, it is the soul of its designer and/or dweller, laid out on display.
Source: Hamptons.co.uk
From the outside and in the immediate entryway, it appears like a normal England townhome. The house’s spine feels traditional — a banister staircase in a white hall adorned with molding and detail. You walk in, welcomed by a pleasant ornate rug and a place to hang your coat. Yet, then you look just a few feet ahead, and you see another rug that is, while not altogether bad on its own, utterly jarring next to the atrium’s. This is the first hint that the house is not what it seems. The staircase becomes a mess on its own, with two benches slowing down traffic between the levels of the home. They are beautiful little couches on a beautiful rug, but they clutter the space in such a way to render them nuisances and unpretty. Beauty and functionality both be damned.
Then there’s the pink, bubblegum, amoxicillin, Baker-Miller, however you wish to distinguish it. If Baker-Miller isn’t controversial, it should be; the color should never qualify as a pacifier. If anything, it is an agitator. (The original Baker-Miller study’s results, which claim the hue is calming, haven’t really been replicated. But that argument is for another day.) And the choice of the walls was neither laud toward femininity nor a nod to Cave’s status as a “wife guy.” These are the walls of the agitated, the grotesque-loving, the sadomasochistic. I see these walls, and lines like “I’ll shoot you all for free” make sense. He was surrounded by aggression when he wrote them!
Source: Hamptons.co.uk
The pinks from hell wash several rooms — the living room, kitchen and dining area, bathroom, and even home gym. To paint a bathroom pink is one thing, to make it your home’s motif is another.
Competing for worst flooring are the living and dining rooms, the former with a carpet dyed a flushed red, the latter a blank, shining pearl drifting you into a kind of abyss. While the dining room doesn’t feel as grim as a murder scene, there is something unsettling, almost purgatorial about it. The brightness in the room is perhaps preferable to the odd, green, cavernous master bedroom and bathroom. They aren’t sinister, but they are cluttered, leaving you feeling fittingly caved in. (I wrote the pun intentionally, but the design is there, and I am only an observer stating what I see, so is it truly intentional?)
All this is to say and my harshness aside, I hesitate to say a new owner could make this home better. Despite all its flaws (subjective as they may be, admittedly), there is still traditional structure intact. Ceiling medallions, fireplaces, and molding make up the saving grace, and if the next inhabitant were to rip them all out, then that would surely be more murderous than the current interior. And to the Caves’ credit, their furniture — the red couch, dining set, gilded mirrors, light fixtures — and trinkets found on bookshelves contribute to a level of charm. Unfortunately, such delights are not supported by the color palette and bare walls. There is much left to be desired. There was a loudness I was hoping for that included gallery walls, perhaps with unsightly, or even grossly hideous, paintings, and I realize that perhaps I was hoping for the same loudness seen in the old Let Love In, Murder Ballads Cave. I should have expected the deconstructed, soft obscurities like what we hear in Ghosteen and Carnage.
While I’ll continue to revere Nick’s music and Susie’s clothing, perhaps I won’t be taking much interior inspiration from them in my new apartment.
