Last November, a charming and beautifully renovated weatherboard house in O'Connor sold for just under $1.9 million.
Heritage-listed, and very Old Canberra, it had plenty going for it, but its origins as a former US airbase hut from World War II were surely a selling point.
It's one of about 200 houses clustered in O'Connor and Turner known as Tocumwals - a distinctive Canberra housing type of the late 1940s.
They're a reminder of a decade in which Canberra entered its rapid post-war development, which saw the city barely keeping up with the needs of its growing population.
What do you do when you need to build hundreds of houses in a hurry?
And what if you're in a barely populated - but rapidly growing - capital city in the years straight after the end of World War II?
The solution for Canberra in 1946 was to find some barely-used housing stock elsewhere, and have it sent over.
The post-war reconstruction project was in full swing, and people were pouring into Canberra, finally, to take up posts in the public service, lead government departments, start creating the Australian National University, and work on construction projects.
The population before the war had been 10,000, and by 1946 it was already about 15,000. Housing supply was low, and most development in Canberra had stalled between the two wars and throughout the Depression years.
The Tocumwal aircraft base in NSW, on the river border with Victoria, meanwhile, presented an enticing solution; the jointly funded US base included barracks for nearly 4000 American personnel that were designed externally to look like ordinary civilian houses. From the air, it looked like a small township, and was less likely to be bombed.
And from the ground, after the war, it was a large mass of empty houses that could find a place elsewhere.
Looking back, it's astounding to think that within a year of the war ending, these houses were already en route to their new home in the capital - more than 200 of them, dismantled and transported to Canberra, then rebuilt in the new suburbs of O'Connor, Turner and Ainslie.
They varied from two- to three-bedroom cottages - some had even been offices - and would be allotted to couples and families on the same principle.
It was the largest - and probably only - mass movement of houses in Australia's history.
Many of the new residents arrived in O'Connor in 1948 which was, unfortunately, the wettest winter for years.
The Tocumwal development was basically two sets of four cul-de-sacs, divided by a strip of parkland called "the Paddock". It was all mud and no trees, which can't have been easy for the many new residents coming from the well-kept streets of Melbourne.
It didn't take long for these still-treeless suburbs to fill up with families and become a community, but ANU physicist Marcus Oliphant was appalled. The view from his home up on O'Connor ridge had been spoiled by having to look down on the expanse of cottages below. There were no trees and he was sure they would become slums that no one would ever want to live in.
In a letter to The Canberra Times in 1953, six years after the cottages were installed, he bemoaned the "ruthless destruction of every living tree to make room for regimented hutments of substandard wooden houses".
"These areas will inevitably become the dumping grounds for those who care nothing for their surroundings," he wrote.
That was more than 70 years ago, and the Tocumwals remain as a quirky reminder of Canberra's patchy planning history, and the can-do mentality of a capital struggling to its feet and desperately trying to accommodate the public servants pouring into the post-war city.
But back in the day, the exalted Professor Oliphant was roundly rebuked for his arrogance; the Labor politician Jim Fraser, the lone parliamentary representative for the ACT from 1951 to 1970, sent a brutal rebuff.
He pointed out that the 200-odd homes were a source of relief for the long list of families who had been desperately waiting - some living in hostels and even tents - for housing, and ordered the professor to check his privilege.
"The magnificent home of Professor Marcus Oliphant occupies a splendid site on a hillside north of Black Mountain. It is a home of approximately 33 squares ... it cost something in the vicinity of £17,000," Mr Fraser wrote.
"This money was provided by the Australian taxpayers, some of whom are the people who have been happy to move into the 'painted wooden homes' Professor Oliphant abhors."
Today, Tocumwals are highly sought after, and regularly sell for upwards of $1.5 million - the current record was $2.25 million back in the peak of the housing boom in 2022.
Jim Fraser's son Andrew Fraser, lawyer and former chief of staff at The Canberra Times, lives with his family in a Tocumwal and can't imagine living anywhere else.
His wife, Pearls and Irritations editor and former chief executive of Universities Australia Catriona Jackson, says the house with weatherboard-and-fibro fronts was perfect from the get-go.
"There was a lightness about the house. I just loved it immediately," she says, of finding their Tate Street house.
"They are beautiful houses with incredible elegance on the roof line. It just felt like my great-grandmother's beach house at Point Lonsdale in Victoria. There was space above your head ... and you could see the garden from every single room."
International law professor Kent Anderson is also a fan; he moved to Canberra to lecture at the Australian National University in 2000 and was immediately drawn to the parts of Canberra's history he saw all around the Inner North.
"When we first got here, I would have had some hesitancy on a weatherboard," he says.
"But they're so quintessential - their face just looks so perfectly of the era that I kind of overcame it.
"If you asked a kindergartener to draw what a house looks like, they would draw a Tocumwal," he says.
"They just look perfect."
