VERYONE HAS THEIR DREAM HOME. For a bunch of Melbourne people, it’s an old place on Sydney Road, Brunswick. It used to be a Chinese restaurant; shop downstairs, flat upstairs. The ‘New Moon Cafe’ sign still hangs out the front. “It was weird and mysterious,” says Karlee Sangster. “I think it was a crazy share house, and was always really rundown and interesting looking.” Everyone in the area knows the building, she says. All her friends have fantasised about what they would do with it if they ever got it. Even before she met her partner Oliver Hextall, “we were always both quietly in love with the building,” she says. Karlee and Oliver liked the house they were in, except for the spiralling rent and the landlord talking about redevelopment. They vaguely started to look for
