How about a $30M fixer-upper

So, okay. The asking price for the mansion at 130 Comm Ave isn't technically $30M. It's priced to sell at $29.9M. Which still makes it the most expensive single-family house on the market in Boston today. But I think it will actually go for less, given that the majority of the buyers who have the scratch and the interest to take this place on are likely going to want to do some pretty extensive reno. As in get rid of the skulls that are the central design theme. 

Some of the reno would be cosmetic - just a matter of stripping some skullish wallpaper, rolling up a skullish rug, take the skullish painting off the wall - but someone's going to have to take a jackhammer and/or a sledgehammer to that shower floor. 

Seriously, just who's all this into the skull motif? Deadheads? Bikers? Ghouls? Funeral parlor owners? (The ritziest girls in my high school were the daughters of funeral parlor families. One of them got a Mustang for her 16th birthday, and this was back in the day when even the ritziest kids didn't have their own cars.)

The owner, VC Kevin Starr, purchased this house in 2015 for the mere amount of $11.6 and then dropped a few million renoing it to what is presumably Starr's taste. 

Yowza! I love the color blue, but that is some taste. Some of the rooms are a bit lower-key (i.e., to me: livable) - the Sotheby's listing is here - but I can't see myself getting any relaxing done in that blue room. (In the Boston Globe article I saw, there are other garish rooms shown.)

The Globe article said that Starrr and his family have decamped to calmer suburban precincts. (My guess his wife wanted something a bit more normal for the kiddos. I bet their new place in swanky Weston is a tad more subdued.)

The Commonwealth Avenue mansion is, from the outside, absolutely gorgeous, the location fabulous. 

And the specs are plenty impressive: 6 BR, 8 baths, roofdeck, and - amazingly - six parking spaces. (Parking places in this neck of the woods cost hundreds of thousand. I live not far from there, and a space around the corner recently sold for half-a-million.)

But I still don't know why anyone would want to gunk up such a beautiful spot with skulls, etc. 

You don't have to go all Gilded Age - brocade swags and whatever - but there's contemporary and there's contemporary. And 130 Comm Ave is one mighty excrescence of a contemporary.

There's a snotty expression I haven't heard in years - and don't believe I've ever uttered -  that was a staple putdown of my girlhood: All their taste is in their mouth.

Indeed.