I just had this big argument with my family over what the ‘classic’ Australian house is. I mean, I’ve never contemplated such a thing in my life, so I wasn’t in a great position to come up with an answer. Certainly, I struggled to defend my point in the face of my parents and sister, who’ve evidently spent a good deal of time thinking it through.
According to mum, it’s the Queenslander. Well, I don’t even know what a Queenslander is, so how classic can it really be? It seems pretty region-specific, too, which was a point that my sister made. For her, a modular, passive solar and drought-resistant design is the answer, to which dad countered that while an attractive idea, it’s hardly the norm and cannot be considered a classic. In his view, the federation-era worker’s cottage epitomises local living.
My sister scoffed at dad’s reasoning, while mum fussed around on her phone to trying to read up on passive solar. Up to this point, I was finding it all quite interesting – like I said, it was something I’d never thought about before, and I was still trying to figure out the implications of the question. But then my sister had to go and rope me into the debate, and that’s when things started to get ugly.
My response what to ask a professional – like, find a buyers advocate for hire. Melbourne has no shortage of people who could give you a comprehensive answer to something like this, after all. I thought it was a perfectly reasonable answer, but apparently it wasn’t. Everyone instantly got up in arms, saying that it’s typical of me to just throw money at a question instead of thinking about my values. I hadn’t realised it was a test of my character, but whatever.
Maybe the classic Australian house is actually just the one with the best market prospects. If you ask me, my answer was easily the most objectively on point. Have you looked at property prices lately?