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Nick and Susie Cave’s colourful Brighton townhouse on sale for £3.25m

 (Dave Benett/Getty Images for The)
(Dave Benett/Getty Images for The)

A Grade I-listed townhouse belonging to the Nick Cave and his wife, fashion designer Susie, has gone on sale for £3.25 million.

The couple bought a maisonette in the house for £165,000 in 2002.

They later bought an adjoining property and turned them into one larger home, becoming favoured local celebrities in Brighton.

The eight-bedroom terraced house is part of a classic stucco-fronted Regency crescent and is spread across 6,397 square feet over five storeys.

It has four bathrooms, four reception rooms, a library, gym and sauna.

The lower ground floor, housing two of the bedrooms, is a basement apartment, with its own entrance, sitting room, kitchen and bathroom.

Upstairs, there’s an open-plan kitchen and dining room, spanning the length of the house.

Painted entirely in lilac with black kitchen units, there’s a long farmhouse table and homely fireplace at the centre of the room.

A grand piano stands in a sitting room on the floor above where tall, floor-to-ceiling windows give views over the sea. The walls are pale pink, complemented by a darker pink carpet and red velvet upholstery.

A fan of period property, fashion designer Susie bought an abandoned 1860 Sunday school and turned it into the headquarters for her brand, The Vampire’s Wife.

The label is best known for the Falconetti, dubbed the dress of the decade by Vogue and worn by everyone from Kate Middleton, who picked an emerald green number for her first official portrait, to Margot Robbie and Holly Willoughby in ruby red and Cave’s fellow Australian and collaborator Kylie Minogue in pink.

Although a restrained cream colour on the outside, the house’s interiors are as rainbow coloured as her fashion range from the pink-walled gym to the lilac kitchen and bold green master bedroom suite with its plant-filled bathroom with clawfoot bathtub.

The house was the work of leading Regency architect Charles Augustin Busby, who designed a number of buildings around Brighton, and retains its original shutters, wooden floors and decorative architraves.

Originally from Australia, Nick Cave found fame as the frontman of the band The Birthday Party and, later, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Having lived in London, Berlin and São Paulo, Cave married Susie Bick in 1999 and moved to Brighton shortly afterwards.

“[Brighton is] about as close to the edge of England as you can get before falling into the sea,” said Cave in an earlier interview.

“Australians always kind of cling to the edge. I just like having a bit of a view. I like the view. I’m literally looking out over the sea, so it’s nice.”

Following the tragic death of Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, the family moved to Los Angeles. “Brighton had just become too sad,” wrote Cave on his open question forum The Red Hand Files.

“We did, however, return once we realised that, regardless of where we lived, we just took our sadness with us.”

Despite returning to Brighton, Cave says the couple have begun to spend more time in London, in a “tiny, secret, pink house, where we are mostly happy”.

Cave and Bick put their house on the market last week, cementing their slow departure from Brighton. Cave lost his eldest son, Jethro Lazenby, earlier this year.

“It seems to me that the common agent that binds us all together is loss,” he wrote to a fan this month.

“We reach out and find each other in the common darkness. By doing so we triumph over our collective and personal loss.

“Through kindness we slant, shockingly and miraculously, toward meaning. We discover, in that smallest gesture of goodwill laid at the feet of our mutual and monumental loss, ‘the point’.”

The property is listed for £3.25 million with Hamptons.