lily allen and the delusion of the perfect 'forever house'

that brooklyn brownstone is the real star of the show, and just like its owners it's more famous than ever and back on the market at double the price

I remember poring over the photos when they first appeared in Architectural Digest in early 2023. Even back then, before the album, the gossip, ethical non-mog outrage, the femomenen watershed moment and the inevitable bro-come-down, I knew.

I knew it in my body; the images made me feel queasy. There was something off about it. The house wasn’t right.

It’s not that it wasn’t gorgeous. It was — and still is — spectacular. A double-wide Do The Right Thing brownstone in the fillet of the slouchiest artisanal urban village on earth. A house which is back the market for just under $8 mill (USD) as of last week, the week of the album’s release. Just think about that for a second. A breathtaking publicity leveraging in the aligned economic interest of two apparent aversaries, isn’t it? More on that later, but for now let’s talk about the townhouse, the brownstone, whatever it’s called. That most enviable of urban abodes: The kind of pink sandstone behemoth only people like Tina Brown and Jeffery Epstein could ever afford, but in Brooklyn so it’s progressive and understated in an I-want-I’ll have-it-kinda way.

Bones like Linda Evangelista circa George Michael’s Freedom. Airplane hangar ceilings. Those vast double-aspect Georgian-paned windows. The soft light of Avignon after the Spanish civil war. And that’s all before we even get to the inside, the space where everything that apparently happened or didn’t happen. The dojo-turned-pussy-palace — or was that the flat? — anyway doesn’t matter, rich people are confusing. What does matter very much is the interior. That green velvet-tufted-gay-hairdresser-orgy-sofa, the pick ‘n mix clash of patterns, the wallpaper, the floors. Carpet in the bathroom! Wall-to-wall plush! Gutsy that.

It’s an object of beauty specific to its time and place, which was 2023. Obviously, in fashion terms, that was then. But David Cotton’s still a thing, as every illiterate fourteen year old TikTok streamer now knows. And no one who saw that house then, ever forgot it. Seriously, I’ve done a vast survey using a sample group of six women at a dinner party in North London.

And we must remember it was not just Lily Allen’s house but the house that she bought with that actor guy she met on Raya. Whatshisface? David Strangerbeard. Anyway, the house. The house! An exercise in trans-Atlantic retro-maximalism at the aesthetic’s peak-bling phase. Edith-Wharton-meets-Claus-Von-Bulow’s-dead-wife with insouciant accents of Disney princess bordello… I have a lot more to say about it obviously but I will shut up now and get to the heart of the matter.

There was also something dreadful about that house. Something vacant in the pupil. It was beautiful and doomed, like the late Princess Diana in black velvet frock returning to the table smelling faintly of vomit and spearmint. Looking at it, I had only one thought, Eeeesh.

For starters, why was it in Architectural Digest? That magazine (which full disclosure, I love so much so I have bought up old copies in bulk on eBay), does not exist to showcase the houses of mainstream celebrities. Its sole purpose is for snooping on a very specific kind of deranged plutocrat or pauper, by which I mean no one you or I have ever heard of. It’s interior fetish porn. The Feeld of glossy magazines. It’s for gawking at the secret Venetian palazzo’s of ancient countesses who are trying to give their fentanyl dealer/decorator a boost, or the empty Welsh bothy occupied by a pair of vegan potters from Portland Oregon who accidentally drunk-bought the place on the internet one night, then moved in and home-birthed four daughters and a lamb.

Lily Allen’s house? It felt desperate and weird.

There was some frantic about its perfection. Human suffering radiated off the page, even in 2023. Come to think of it 2023 was probably the hellacious thick of it. They knew they would sell it. Probably that’s why they agreed to the Architectural Digest shoot. By then it was all over, the writing was on the wallpaper, strewn among the hand-painted flowers of that unsexy bedroom mural.

That house is the point of the story, the crux of the album. It’s the beating heart of why we all keep talking and reading about it. This is not about a break up, polyamory, the state of marriage, female outrage or male selfishness. I mean it is, in a way, but that’s not the point. It’s not even really about the music which is catchy but in the temporarily diverting manner of kitsch-pop Pyjama Game update.

Once the story fades, the songs will be forgotten. A century from that brownstone will still be standing. The unhappy marital home that became a haunting piece of art. It’s not a house I’d ever buy even if I could afford it. Not house I’d want to set foot in. But someone will buy it just as a conversation piece. Probably they already have.

And it is a bit awkward, isn’t it, that the house actually is back on the market at double the price? Bit awkward that it’s owners presumably agreed to flog it at this particular moment in time? Also a bit awkward that not only is the house more famous and rich as a result of the album and surrounding publicity and so are its owners.

Consider for a moment the fate of poor David Strangerbeard. The apparent creep at the centre of the ‘scandal.’ He isn’t actually cancelled or ruined. He didn’t actually do anything wrong apart from change his mind and have emotional sex with a real woman who wasn’t an escort. What a crime! And now, because of the album, everyone on the planet earth knows his real name. He’s properly famous-famous. That’s quite an accomplishment for a middling actor in middle age. That’s currency worth enduring public humiliation for. If you don’t believe me just ask Meghan Markle.

Will his career suffer as a result? I very much doubt it. Lily Allen’s certainly won’t and good for her. As for the house? Well the house is winning it. The house is the lead. The house is the void we can’t stop starring into because it terrifies us.

The story of that house reveals something about all of us. In London, the city where I live, the house-beautiful cult is like a virus. It seems to grow in inverse proportion to the eternally dismal economic forecast. The interior design obsession never stops. Example: it has become commonplace for common people where I live to regard their homes as set pieces and brand extensions rather than places where they live with their families. In my neighbourhood, middle class professional couples think nothing of spending several years at a stretch searching out, buying, gutting and meticulously doing up houses at enormous expense, not just to their bank balances but their sanity and personal happiness. I have known not just one but several intelligent educated women (always, always women, invariably mothers) who have abandoned and/or put on hold hard won careers in order to ‘project manage’ epic back-to-the-studs renovations that stretch on like Russian novels.

These women suffer and starve, gnaw on frozen rotted potatoes, camp out in unheated building sites with toddlers for periods of four to six years, sometimes more. Their marriages suffer during these gut jobs. The inhabitants lose their minds and become boring to everyone around them including themselves. They cannot think or talk about anything of substance beyond weighted drawers, cornices, granite grain and light fixtures. They begin to believe these things are an actual matter of life or death.

Renovation brain is like baby brain but so much worse, for the obvious reason there’s no baby involved. I have seen the best minds of my generation lost to kitchen extensions. Truly! The only woman I know who sailed through a gut job was Georgie, but that’s because she’s an architect and Ben is a builder. Even then there were tears.

Did we all actually go to university in order to become volunteer construction project mangers in the prime of our lives? Apparently yes, because a woman on the brink of marital collapse will risk anything in pursuit of the perfect house. I’ve seen this story play out over and over again.

But surely no one actually believes that doing up a house is a substitute for meaningful work? Or that a perfect house makes for a perfect and harmonious family life? Well adjusted children? Passionate sex? And yet every generation falls for the same trick. Why?

There’s something else driving the perfect house obsession. It’s the same fallacy that made women of previous generations obsessed with cleanliness and germ-killing and before that flower arranging and needle point. It’s the delusion that if we can just focus on the details, fuss and fuss and fuss, eventually we will make everything perfectly perfect and shiny on the outside and the inside will naturally follow suit. But human relationships don’t work like that.

Having been through the wringer of divorce as both a child and an adult I have moved house countless times. Currently I am trapped in the marital home, bound to a husband who is unable or willing to divorce me. I’ve also done my fair share of renovating and agonising over cabinet knobs and here’swhat I’ve learned: beyond a modicum of comfort and space, the house is irrelevant to the state of the relationships that exist within it. Aesthetics are accessories to life, they are not love or sex or art. They are not even water or food.

What divorce forces you to acknowledge is that your perfect house won’t save you. It didn’t save me as a child anymore than it did as a middle aged woman who made the same mistake my own mother did. Lily Allen’s album is a hit because it’s a reckoning with this universal thought trap. The cautionary tale of the perfect house. New furnishings, same blunder. Having said that I’m still all for wall-to-wall patterned carpet in the bath.