The first room we walked into was the kitchen, it honestly looked great.

“This is the smallest of the two kitchens in this house, but like the rest of the house, this kitchen has only been renovated last year. The renovators had decided to keep to the style of the mansion while installing some modern day conveniences.” Madeleine walked over to one of the closets and pulled on it, revealing the dishwasher. Even the fridge had been worked into wooden cabinets that really did look like it would fit perfectly into the time period. “This kitchen is mainly used to provide the tearoom with tea and snacks.” Madeleine also pointed at the oven, stylized to look like it came from the 19th century.

“That’s great.” Em was marveling about the kitchen together with Ria.

Claire crossed her arms while standing next to me. “Why did they want to sell the house if they’ve only recently renovated it?” She asked.

Madeleine didn’t give her question a lot of time to sit there as she immediately replied. “The owner is someone who buys up old houses in need of restoration, restores them, and then sells them for profit. Most of the renovated houses you’ve seen today or owned by him.”

“It almost sounds like you have a deal with him.” I replied.

“I actually do.” Madeleine admitted. “I think the man does very good work to keep the core of these old houses intact while still adapting them to our modern needs. Where the historical elements are there, he accentuates them, where those elements weren’t really present, he blends them more with modern architecture.”

“And he manages to still make a profit? Renovating isn’t cheap, is it?” Claire asked on.

“He’s a good businessman.” Madeleine nodded. “However, he doesn’t purely do it for profit either. This house for example will probably break him even if we manage to sell it. It’s a way of preserving history that interests him more than the money alone.”

“Hmm. I can agree with that vision, definitely.” I nodded.

Madeleine smiled and then continued the tour with us.

We visited the tearoom that was connected to the entry hallway next. It was pretty much what you would expect of an art nouveau tea-room, apart from the flat screen television set that had been worked into the wall.

“You can also hide the television like this.” Madeleine pulled on the side of the wall, which made a landscape painting slide out in front of the television.

“That’s neat.” I looked at the painting on the wall, if you didn’t know there was something behind it, you would not be able to see it that easily.

“If you were wondering, the entirety of the furniture inside this house can also be bought together with the property.”

“That’d be useful.” Em commented. “That means we won’t have to go to MEAK to go and get furniture.”

“But what if I want a shark plush, Em?” Ria asked.

Em chuckled. “That means we won’t have to go to MEAK to go and get furniture, apart from shark plushies for our girlfriend.”

“There’s plenty of rooms in this house left empty.” Madeleine continued. “So, for example, installing a room with the sole purpose of having it filled to the brim with cushions, pillows and plushies, would not even fly on your radar as a waste of space.”

Ria’s eyes went wide, and I realized what Madeleine had done. We’d have a very hard time to persuade Ria not to get a plushie room now. What a saleswoman indeed…

“Rora…” Ria turned herself towards me, making both Claire and Em chuckled as they’d also seen what happened.

“Yes… yes… I know…” Although, honestly, having the opportunity to see Ria dive into a room that’s filled to the brim with plushies and softness… I’m actually not against that idea. And if I were a betting woman, I’d say that’d count for Em as well.

“Yay.” Her eyes started glistering, which was already worth the effort if you asked me.

“Would you like to see the rest of the building too, or have you already decided on buying the house?” Madeleine smirked.

“Let’s see the rest of the house first.” I shook my head in slight disbelief. But I think most people here already knew that I was going for this house.

“It’s a house fitting for a young noblewoman as yourself.” Claire joked, confirming my suspicion. “Don’t forget to decorate a room where we can hang out as well. A lady cave, so to speak.”

“There’s plenty of room for that too, there’s even a basement if you would like to decorate it like that.” Madeleine had been listening in, as a good saleswoman would.

“What basement?” Em asked.

“I’ll show it to you before we head upstairs.” She guided us through the ground floor, showing us the little ladies room, which was nothing special although still as fancy as the rest of the ground floor, a decent place to do your number ones and two’s in. There was a decently sized pantry too, and all the way in the back there was an incredibly beautiful véranda with incredible art-nouveau glass work. That led into a relatively large city garden. Nothing compared to the garden Em had at her house, but nice enough to be able to give a barbecue for your friends and just relax on those hot summer days.

When we got back inside, we headed towards the staircase, but Madeleine stopped us at the door underneath. “This leads down to the basement.” She opened the door and flicked on the light. “If you’d like to follow me?”

“Behind you.” Alessia nodded as we all followed Madeleine downstairs.

“This used to be a wine cellar.” Madeleine commented as we all arrived at the bottom of the stairs. The basement was bigger than I expected, with arches worked into the walls, presumably where the wine barrels and wine racks were.

“There’s heating worked into the floor so it can be a pleasant place to stay both in the winter as in the summer when this is naturally cooler.”

“That’s definitely an advantage. Especially now that summers are getting hotter…” Em replied, looking at the flooring.

“About that, there is air conditioning installed on the other floors, just to make summers more liveable too.”

“Is that so?” I tilted my head. “Won’t that look a bit off with the rest of the house.”

“You’ll see.” Madeleine smiled.

Claire chuckled. “Anyhow, I could really see how you could make this into one sick as fuck room. If you put some decorations on the walls, drag in a sofa or two and a table.”

“And we could put a projector on the ceiling and a high quality projector screen so we can watch movies here.” Em nodded along.

“Oh yeah! That’d be so cool!” Ria agreed.

“Well, we were talking about getting a little home cinema. This room is naturally dark enough so we won’t have any light falling onto the screen.” I tried to imagine the room with the elements Claire and Em had mentioned. It was surprisingly easy to imagine it before me. But I’d probably still have Em help me with the decorating.

Madeleine smiled. “Maybe I should hire you girls to do the selling of houses for me? A home cinema like that does sound very fun.”

“Alessia, what do you think?” I asked. Alessia had been a bit quiet.

“Hmm. I don’t know if I’d personally go for a home cinema system like that per se. But then again, If you don’t use it for a movie night, you could still use it for other things as the projector is attached to the ceiling anyway. I think I’d personally decorate it as a prohibition era bar with a poker table too.”

That honestly sounded pretty cool as well.

“The possibilities are endless.” Madeleine agreed. “If you’ve looked around for long enough, let’s go see the rest of the house.”

We nodded and moved along.

It took almost an hour for us to get through all the other rooms in this house, but that was mostly because we were either goofing off a little or asking a lot of questions. But every single room we saw was very much to my liking. The bedrooms were big and the bathrooms were nice and clean. Luckily, they had decided to install new showers. As much as I liked art-nouveau bathrooms, only having the option to take a bath would not have been very enticing. Yet I was happy to see they also tried to mimic the style they used for the baths in the showers too.

And what I was most interested to see, the air condition system, had been worked away so well into the walls that it fit in place perfectly. They had put the units behind cast iron vent covers that were painted and cast in a way to look like flowers. It was very very much to my liking and it had taken away any doubt I had for this house.

“So, where do I sign?” I asked once we’d seen the last of the rooms.

“Don’t you want to negotiate the price a little bit? The dance of going up and down with your opponent.” Claire replied with a smirk.

“Heck no, I don’t want anyone to run away with it in front of my eyes.”

“While I’d normally tell you to be cautious… It is a very nice house.” Em said as she scratched her cheek.

Madeleine raised her finger. “Let me contact the owner real fast, I’ll be right back with you.”

“Thanks.” I said and Madeleine left the room for a bit. In the meantime, I just took up a spot next to one of the windows looking out at the street. Em and Ria had come with me and were leaning on the wall, while Alessia was still walking around the floor to look at the rooms a bit more.

As for Claire, she was just looking at her phone. “Hey, apparently there’s a WcRonalds not that far away from here. Would you like to go to it afterwards?”

Ria immediately looked at me with sparkles in her eyes.

“Yeah, that could be fun.” I laughed.