Spoilt for choice.
A guided tour of three remarkable Bavarian properties, followed by the agony of choosing between them.
Dear reader,
You'll remember that this story doesn't run in chronological order, and today I've decided to moonlight as your personal estate agent. Allow me to offer you a little guided tour of the Bavarian property market.
Three houses, three different Bavarias, and a single price bracket: the one where the price tag is the last thing anyone looks at.
Everything below is the plain truth. Nothing here needs embellishing. I checked.
Untereulenthal
Villa Eulenthal
On paper the address reads Geisenfeld, a town in Upper Bavaria, but in reality Untereulenthal belongs to the category the Germans call an Einöde: the official term for a settlement roughly the size of a single farmstead, a couple of kilometres outside Geisenfeld proper. The name translates as Owl Valley, and for once it's truth in advertising: the neighbours here are mostly owls, deer and horses. All around lies the Hallertau, the largest hop-growing region on earth, so the view from your window is quite literally the raw material of German beer. Ingolstadt, where they build Audis, is about half an hour away; Munich, about an hour. The perfect option for someone who needs twelve hectares, a stable block, and a guarantee that nobody will ever pop round to borrow a cup of sugar.
Munich
Westpark Villa
Munich's south-west, fifteen minutes from the centre, in a neighbourhood so quietly bourgeois it practically creaks: doctors, notaries, third-generation owners of family firms. Westpark itself was laid out for the 1983 international garden show, and ever since, a Japanese garden, a Chinese garden, a Thai pavilion with a Buddha, a rose garden and a couple of beer gardens have coexisted there in perfect peace. That's Munich in a nutshell: enlightenment and a one-litre stein a hundred metres apart. This is not Grünwald, where footballers leave their Lamborghinis scattered across the lawn; around here, money prefers to whisper rather than shout. Buying a house by Westpark is how you prove you've made it: by having nothing left to prove.
Schlehdorf / Raut
Historic Villa, Kochelsee
An hour south of Munich, the Bavaria of beer labels and calendars begins, where the first wall of the Alps rises behind the lake and the cows come with bells on. Schlehdorf sits on the western shore of the Kochelsee, and the most prominent building in the village is still the monastery. The region is known as the Blaues Land, the Blue Land: the expressionists of the Blue Rider group, Franz Marc among them, painted their blue mountains and blue horses here, and Marc's museum stands across the lake in Kochel. Which means the view is literally museum-grade, with the paperwork to prove it. Ten million buys you a listed villa under state protection, a private jetty, a tennis court, and that most German of pleasures: clearing your choice of window-frame colour with the heritage office. This is Munich money's weekend belt: close enough to arrive on a Friday evening, far enough that nobody ever drops in unannounced.
Well? Fantastic, all three, if you ask me. But which one to choose?
Writing nonfiction doesn't normally involve climbing inside your characters' heads to guess at their thoughts and motives. Still, I make an exception and climb inside anyway, and for once it's a pleasant place to be: I spent weeks mentally arranging furniture in all three houses and never managed to choose. My characters managed. How they overcame that agony of choice, who helped them through it, and how it all ended is a story I'll tell separately.
Spoiler: the ending is far more interesting than the beginning.