The fifth bedroom of a newly built five-bedroom, three-bathroom home on a 300-square-metre block in Point Cook has, fourteen months after settlement, settled into its true identity: storage for a rowing machine, a squat rack and a stationary bike that have collectively been used nine times.
The house, on a court off Sneydes Road in the estate's newer stage, was bought off a display-home floor plan that listed the room as a "home gym/flex space" alongside a theatre room, a butler's pantry and a "kids' retreat" upstairs. Owner Courtney Dwyer, 37, said the gym equipment arrived within a fortnight of the keys, assembled by a visibly unenthusiastic brother-in-law over an entire Saturday, and was used with some regularity for about six weeks.
"We had a real routine going for a bit there," Ms Dwyer said, standing in a doorway partly blocked by a folded treadmill, a separate piece of equipment to the stationary bike that arrived later, for reasons she described as "a sale that was too good." The theatre room, by contrast, has never screened a film; its projector remains in its box beside a rack of discounted bean-bag seating, because the household's actual television-watching happens, as before, on a couch in the family room next to the kitchen.
The gym-slash-flex room now holds, alongside the three major pieces of equipment, four unopened boxes of children's clothes bought in larger sizes for growth, a wrapped wedding present from 2023, and an ironing board. Ms Dwyer said she still refers to it, out loud and without irony, as "the gym," including to a real estate agent who inspected the property last month for a valuation and wrote it up as a fourth living area.
A project marketing consultant who has worked on display-home estates across Melbourne's west for the past decade, who asked not to be named, said floor plans featuring theatre rooms, home gyms and butler's pantries continue to outsell plans without them by a wide margin regardless of how the rooms are later used, because buyers are purchasing "a version of their future selves" at the point of signing, not a forecast of their laundry habits eighteen months on.
Ms Dwyer said she remains committed to using the gym properly "once things settle down," a phrase she has used in relation to the room on four occasions this year, by her own count, each time while putting something else in it.