The Mandurah Performing Arts Centre

Smack at the head of beautiful Mandjar Bay in the centre of Mandurah is a stunning building: The Mandurah Performing Arts Centre.  This lovely, elegant building was designed by architects Hames Sharley and opened in 1997.  It houses an 800 seat theatre, a 144 seat theatre, an art gallery, a dance studio, various meeting rooms and foyer spaces so expansive and lovely that I just can't help planning events for them every time I walk through them. 

I love this building not just for its great design; I love this building because it gives me hope.  Yes, hope of seeing exciting and interesting shows, attending stimulating exhibitions and fun events there. 

But today as I walked through those light-filled, wood-panelled, expansive foyer spaces, I was filled with another sort of hope.  See today I spent yet another looking at rental houses so ghastly I'd have to be permanently tanked-up on Margaret River wine to live in them.  So the MANPAC building gives me hope that somewhere in the city capable of building that beauty there must be rental accommodation I could live in (sober). 

I've long given up hope of of finding rental accommodation that:
a)  isn't filled with the design crimes known as vertical blinds,
b)  doesn't have at least six archways,
c)  doesn't have wall-to-wall dark brown clinker brick in at least half the rooms,
d)  has eaves (you know, those useful things that shade a house when it is scorching hot outside and shelter it when it is pouring with rain...),
but I draw the line at paying money to live with pink decor.  Given that 90% of the rental accommodation on offer here seems to be pink (or salmon, or dark apricot, or rose...), I'm not doing very well.

So I live in hope, and if I'm wrong, I'll pitch it to the centre's General Manager that my family could move into that beautiful foyer and call ourselves an installation.