News item: Victoria is the third-hottest luxury real estate market in the world, says a report from Christie’s International.
Woke up in my palatial home, made a cappuccino, decided to savour it outside in the warm morning sun, the way one does in Tuscany or the Cinque Terre or Colwood.
Except the wonky screen door that I’ve been meaning to fix for the past 10 years got stuck, causing me to lurch and snag a pant leg on one of the luxury nails working its way out of the luxury postage stamp-size deck (the one with the panoramic view of the wheelbarrow with the flat tire), which led me to slop coffee on the luxury Kirkland brand dockers (pleated, of course) hanging on the luxury clothesline.
I spun around: “I’m thinking of growing a man bun.”
She paused, then shrugged: “Cheaper than a toupee.”
This is the problem with living in the world’s third-hottest luxury market. Once one has ponied up for the likes of the Uplands home just listed for $4.5 million, the Metchosin property recently priced at $28.8 million, or the billionaire’s retreat at James Island (offered for $75 million a couple of years ago), there isn’t much left over for life’s other little luxuries, such as hairpieces, helicopters or Happy Meals.
On top of that, Victorians now face the pressure of the whole hipster fashion thing, with its man buns, Unabomber beards, thick-rimmed glasses, lumbersexual shirts and pleated Kirkland dockers.
We didn’t actually know we were hip until April, when both Vogue magazine and the Toronto Star declared it to be so, which must make it true.
In the surprised/impressed tone of someone who just found an old high school teacher dancing naked at Burning Man, the two publications painted us as some sort of Portland North, gushing about our locavore foodie scene, craft beer and the 900 high-tech companies operating out of funky old brick buildings on Fort Street.
The TC’s Adrian Chamberlain compared this image makeover to that of John Travolta — kind of lame and dated in the years after Saturday Night Fever, suddenly cool after Pulp Fiction.
Good description, but me, I think we look too much like Sally Fields craving acceptance at the Oscars (“You like me!”) to qualify as hipsters.
True hipsters revel in the recondite, would never seek (indeed, shudder at the thought of) mainstream approval. (Stolen joke from an unknown source: Q. How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb? A. It’s an obscure little number, you wouldn’t know it.)
Image is a funny thing. “Part of our challenge … in Victoria is we still think of ourselves as a small, 19th-century outpost of Britain — and we’re not,” Mayor Lisa Helps told the annual general meeting of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce last week.
No, we’re not. Haven’t been so for years. But nor do we fit neatly into any of the other pigeonholes we like to fashion.
Is Victoria hip, youthful, artsy and vibrant? Sure it is — if you live downtown or in Fernwood, or if you’re a travel writer guided by Tourism Victoria.
But get away from the trendier coffee shops and the cafés where the lineup for brunch lasts until supper, and this is still a government-military-retirement town, as well as a bunch of other realities. Young? Our median age is pushing 44, eight years older than it was in 1993. Among western Canadian metro areas, only Kelowna has a higher percentage of seniors. (In the rest of the country, Fifty Shades of Grey is a book; in Victoria it’s either demographics or the weather.) Hip? Yes, Victoria might have a bigger boho factor than most medium-size cities, but it’s not like we had to shutter Walmart.
Ditto for this hot luxury market stuff. It doesn’t really apply unless you live in the Uplands or on the waterfront or in some Range Rover rural acreage or in my house.
“I wonder what the less special, more shabbily homed people are doing today,” I said, placing my coffee on an upturned five-gallon bucket, the one that covers the luxury-sized hole in the deck.
“Did you shave today?” she frowned.
“No,” I said. “I’m growing ironic facial hair.”
An eye roll betrayed her envy of my third-hottest image, so I channelled my inner Kelly Le Brock: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”
“That’s not going to be a problem,” she replied.
