Finding a MACALLÚ place is not proving particularly easy.
There are beautiful houses. There are old houses. There are houses with land, houses with views and houses somebody has already renovated until there is very little left for us to do.
Then occasionally there is one with a bit more oomph.
It might be an odd room, an old stair, a view through one particular window, a courtyard that makes no sense until you stand in it, or simply a building that feels as though it has been there long enough to have collected a few stories. That part is difficult to explain on a spreadsheet. You normally know it when you walk in.
Unfortunately, oomph is not enough.
The economics still have to work. A wonderful old house can become a very expensive way of discovering that the roof, windows, heating, drainage, electrics and half the floors all need doing at once. A property can have acres of land and still have very little usable land. A building can be cheap because the amount required to make it safe and comfortable is larger than the purchase price.
We are not frightened of work. In some ways we would rather have something that needs work, because that gives us a chance to make careful decisions instead of inheriting somebody else's idea of what the building should be.
But there is a line between restoring something and being financially foolish about it.
So the right MACALLÚ property has to hold two things at the same time. It needs enough character that we actually want to save it, and enough sense around the purchase and repair costs that we can afford to do the job properly.
We are not looking for perfect houses.
We are looking for the ones where the imperfections are worth keeping.