81 Mokoia Road, Rotorua, has a lot going for it.
The brick and tile 1970s build house sits on 1011sqm of land overlooking Waimihia Bay. The view of Lake Rotorua alone demands your attention.
But that's not what caught my eye while scrolling through the listing photos. Hanging on the living room wall, in perfect harmony with the immaculately preserved 70s decor surrounding it, is Tina.
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Tina will be instantly recognisable to anyone over 40 and who has harrowing memories of the pictures their nanna's generation liked to display.
She was painted by a British artist J.H. Lynch and her come-hither look could be found in most living rooms from the 1960s onwards, alongside blue-green faced Chinese Girl by Vladimir Tretchikoff - the Mona Lisa of art world kitsch.
Tina by J.H. Lynch.
Lynch's Tina, which art publication AnOther aptly describes as depicting "a voluptuous, kohl-eyed subject, painted in the saturated, sensual style of a B-movie poster", could be found in most high street shops in the UK and New Zealand.
Some estimates put the number of reproductions that were printed in the millions.
But Lynch's paintings were never high art (they did make an appearance in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, but as a punchline for bad taste) and as the 60s and 70s gave way to the 80s, they fell increasingly out of favour. Kiwi home-owners became infatuated first with Don Binney birds, and then in the 90s with Dick Frizzell's Mickey to Tiki.
(Binney's birds were perhaps a nod to the "art" their mothers collected: the carved wooden cranes that were churned out of every intermediate school wood-work class for most of the middle decades of last century.)
Lynch died in 1989 without much fanfare, or respect, but his works have undergone a renaissance of sorts with fashion designer Stella McCartney making Tina's image central to her autumn 2018 collection.
"We embrace realness here, and definitely sexy. We are not scared of being sexy,” McCartney said, explaining her use of Lynch's sultry woman.
So it's possible a whole new generation will be hanging Tina on their walls - although how much value she will add to property values is an open-ended question.
Binney's stylised birds and archetypal New Zealand scenery - posters of which were a fixture of student dorm rooms throughout the 1980s - can change hands for as much as quarter of a million dollars now and original Tretchikoffs can fetch up to half a million.
And "mum's" ubiquitous white china Crown Lynn swan vases now realise $500 at art auctions (the rarer black ones nearly $1000).
* As a side note, there is a New Zealand connection to Lynch. For years rumours abounded that JH Lynch was actually Manawatu-born portrait artist Sister Julia Lynch, who painted countless prominent Kiwis until her death in 1975. The idea that a Kiwi nun was responsible for semi-erotic kitsch paintings seemed to be a popular one.
