‘Smells like teen Kurt’: Cobain’s home for sale
Cobain’s mother, Wendy O’Connor, is putting the 1.5-storey bungalow two hours south-west of Seattle on the market this week.
To help sell it, the family is offering a glimpse into the early life of its tortured and talented son through photos shot at the house, including one of a chocolate-frosted birthday cake for Kurt and a shot of a teenage Cobain smiling, guitar in hand, in his messy room.
The home, last assessed at less than $67,000 (€49,500), is being listed for $500,000 (€370,000). The family said it would welcome a partnership to make the home into a museum. His room still has the stencil-like band names — Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin — he reportedly put on the walls, as well as the holes he put in them.
“We’ve decided to sell the home to create a legacy for Kurt, and yes, there are some mixed feelings since we have all loved the home and it carries so many great memories,” Cobain’s sister, Kim Cobain, said.
“But our family has moved on from Washington, and (we) feel it’s time to let go of the home.”
The house, a 1923 structure with dingy carpeting, water-stained wooden shingles on some interior walls, and a recent coat of yellow paint, is on East 1st St in Aberdeen, a gritty and struggling former timber town at the mouth of the Chehalis River near the south-west Washington coast.
Cobain’s parents bought it in 1969, when Kurt was 2. He lived there until they separated when he was 9, and again with his mum during his later teen years.
The heroin-addicted Cobain took his life in Seattle in 1994, at age 27, after a meteoric career that popularised the Pacific North-west’s heavy, muddy “grunge” rock. The last of Nirvana’s three studio albums, In Utero, came out in Sept 1993, and Universal Music Group has released a remastered version and a “super deluxe” boxset.
Cobain described his early childhood in Aberdeen as happy. As author Charles R Cross noted in his Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven, he would ride his bike around the small yard and pound on a set of Mickey Mouse drums his parents bought him.
But his parents’ divorce scarred him deeply. At one point, he scrawled “I hate Mom, I hate Dad” on his bedroom wall, Cross wrote.
“It’s a place where he had very fond memories, but it’s the house where his parents got divorced,” Cross said in an interview.
“He couldn’t wait to get away, but it’s a place that helped shape who he became.”
According to The Agency, the Beverly Hills-based luxury real estate firm marketing the property, it features the dining room table and hutch from when Cobain lived there. Cobain’s mattress is tucked away in a musty upstairs crawl space.
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