Great Moments in Maine Real Estate: The Holy Shit Edition

Now you real estate people have really gone and done it. You’ve enticed me — no, compelled me — strike that — backed me into a corner and forced me to use an honest to goodness, Anglo-Saxon word in the title. Nothing but strong language, and a strong drink nearby, will prepare you for the residential feast of worms you’re about to eat. Normally, on Great Moments in Maine Real Estate, we feature a melange of different real estate fiascos. Not today. Just one house in this installment, and it takes the moldy dumb cake. Ladies and gemmen, I give you The Camden Architectural Apocalypse, by the architects Sodom and Gomorrah, AIA:

You’re going to have to keep two things in mind before we venture further. Firstly, once we really get going, you’re going to completely forget that no matter how bizarre the house is, how thunder and lightning vulgar, psychedelic flashback inducing, spastic budgeted, delirium tremens suborned that this place appears, it’s nothing but a split level ranch with two undersized garage doors. Try to stay focused.

Secondly, it’s in Camden Maine:

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with Maine in general, and Camden in particular, I’ll try to explain both. For the most part, Maine is an undifferentiated morass of bogs, trees, mud, flies, barren-looking potato fields, wind and solar farm abominations, dotted only occasionally with trailer parks and the vinyl-sided hulks of capes, farmhouses, and bungalows. It’s huge, with no one in it. Well, except for a strip along the southern coast, which includes Camden, where Thurston Howell VII summers, and uses summer as a verb.

Camden is close to the perfect imaginary ideal image of Maine everyone “from away” thinks of when he thinks of our fair state. Despite what you see in the picture, it’s not just a yacht club that won’t let in any garlic eaters. Camden is a twee village hard by the Atlantic, just far enough from Boston and New York to feel like vacation if you’re a partner in a white-shoe law firm. It’s a mayonnaise on white bread sandwich traditionally peopled by rich swells with lots of whales on their pants and zeroes in their trust funds. These people are capable of anything. They’ll eat rhubarb for dessert, and look you right in the eye and tell you they like it.

But they’re not capable of living in a split level ranch under any circumstances, even if it costs 2.2 million spondulicks like this one does. And boyo, am I going to show you some circumstances. What this thing is doing, and doing in Maine, is a dark and bloody mystery to me.

A slight digression: On the intertunnel, it’s fairly common to find numerous writers who make a hobbyhorse out of disliking Baby Boomers. I suspect that it’s mostly because their parents would rather go on cruises than do the decent thing and die suddenly, in order to leave enough money for them to buy more Lego sets and Star Wars action figures than the other middle-aged guys that work in their cubicle farm. I can’t say I blame them. Technically, I’m a Boomer, and I don’t like Abba or flared pants or Hamburger Helper or mustaches or ‘vettes or shag carpeting or hot tubs or avocado and harvest gold appliances. But a word of caution to my friends who hate me and my cohort over nothing more than the calendar: When the Boomers croak, the last architect who could use a T-square and pencil will be gone, and all you have left is people who learned architecture from Minecraft:

Let’s step inside, shall we?

As the pornographer once said, there’s a lot to take in here, but if everyone does their best, I’m sure we can get through it.

Let’s start with those, ahem, columns. Pilasters, almost. You know, when I spend big money on Corinthian capitals for my  pole-like structures, I don’t want to waste them way up high where the chandeliers soar. I put them upside-down on the floor, where everyone can enjoy them. Easier to dust the acanthus leaves, too.

Then of course, the first thing I do when I come home from a hard day of selling opium in China, or whatever your WASPy relatives did to make Camden money, is to fix myself a good, stiff drink. Luckily, this has been already been taken care of, courtesy of a pixellated-tile bar over on the right. In this house, everything you can think of has been taken care of for you, including many, many things no one sane person would ever think of.

Hey, let’s look at the kitchen, or should I say, kitschen:

Now, I’m not going to exaggerate here, because what’s the point of that? It’s quite possible that the countertops are not made from recycled bowling balls and skateboard wheels. It’s likely, but not certain, so I’m not going to accuse anyone without more proof. Never mind that. I’ve been alive a long time. Long enough, apparently, to finally find someone who thought it would be a grand idea to tile both the inside and the outside of the kitchen cabinets, and finish it off a faux marble flat astragal moulding. Unless it’s not faux. Then I sit corrected.

If the kitchen leaves your stomach unsettled, repair to the bathroom to compose yourself, and — whoah Nellie:

Boy howdy, they love that tile. Most of the house is encrusted with it. I love the crystal funerary sink and the roll of paper towels to dry your hands. Very classy. And that tub. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to get in it and look out, or be outside it and look in. If you’re not Gussie Fink-Nottle, I’m not sure I grok the utility of it. There are eleventy bathrooms in the joint, and they all have them.

Most of the the bedrooms are comparatively staid, if you overlook the gold lame headboards, anyway. There are gigantic televisions everywhere. In some cases, they’re stacked on on top of the other, like here. I’m trying to picture two people in bed watching two different things at the same time, but I can’t. Not without going back to the foyer for another stiff one.

My wife pointed out something. Many rooms have these little tables and ergonomic chairs in the corner. She said it looked like a manicure station from a salon. Dear Buddha, is this house built with the proceeds of a mani pedi empire? They’ve got calendars hanging over them, too, to keep track of the appointments.

The garage is interesting. I had Lyme Disease once. That was also interesting. I’m trying to conjure up a flooring material worse for a garage than polished granite, but I can’t. The marble door surrounds try to compete with the floor, and the brass railings, but they can’t compete, either.  I predict that someone will compete with that column sooner or later. And lose.

The landscaping ceded the field early on to the hardscaping. When you’ve got a fountain and elephants to do the heavy exterior lifting, why even bother. They didn’t. Seventeen gas station flowers did the trick.

The RE listing uses several adjectives that can be taken two ways that give the game away:

Exquisite

Exacting

Exceptional

Unique

and of course:

Incredible

Well, they hit the target with that last one. I’ve seen it, and I still don’t believe it.

See all 57 pictures here, if you dare.

 

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