I won my dream home but I don't want to live there! JANE FRYER talks to an ... trends now

Which is your favourite Omaze mega-mansion?

Perhaps it's the £2.5million 'Forest House' in Dorset, complete with woodland views, tropical landscaping, a lot of very shiny windows and an outdoor shower, which is the prize in this month's property raffle.

Or last month's seven-bedroom Cheshire pad, with gym and cinema room.

Or you might still be pining for either the £3million sandstone villa in Mallorca in a 'palette of creams, off-whites and earth tones', or the £3.5million Scotland house, festooned with fake fur throws, which were up for grabs recently.

Or maybe you're still waiting for something a little bit more, well, understated, to pop up in the charity prize draw that, lately, everyone seems to be talking about.

For June Smith, 75, the one that really turned her head was Pieds Dans L'eau, a £4.5million Cornish beauty, perched above the water and overlooking Fowey like a James Bond pad, that was raffled last February. And according to Omaze chief international officer, James Oakes, it caused a bidding frenzy like no other.

'There was something about it,' he says.

June, a widowed mother-of-three and grandmother from Essex, certainly felt strangely compelled.

'I knew the minute I saw it, I had to enter,' she says.

In fact, June is convinced that it was Ron, her late husband of 45 years, who propelled her back to her computer to spend £25 on online tickets.

'We'd entered a couple of times together and I had this feeling I had to go for it.'

And she's extremely grateful to him because, hey presto, last May, she won the 5,300 square foot house.

'I am sure Ron made it happen,' she laughs, as we stand on the quayside in Fowey and stare at it across the water as workmen — or maybe it's cleaners, or security staff or someone to service the underfloor heating, it's hard to tell from here — buzz about between the main house and the separate yoga studio.

'Ooh, it's lovely. You don't even need a TV because you could just watch the boats. That was my bedroom at the top — and you do really need the curtains because you can't exactly nip to the loo in the night otherwise,' she says.

Because, unlike June's 'perfectly nice' former two-bedroom home, Pieds Dans L'eau is a house that everyone stares at, points at and even lusts after.

It is big, glassy, very luxurious and, with six bedrooms, that yoga studio and private jetty, it felt far too big when — after one extended, glorious summer holiday with all her extended family — it was just June and her daughter left rattling about in it.

'We just sat in the kitchen. We didn't know what to do with ourselves!' she says.

So she promptly sold it, pocketed the £4.5million, paid off her three children's mortgages, but didn't bother upgrading her old Nissan Micra, and now has enough left in the pot for a lot of rainy days.

But something didn't feel quite right.

'I went back to Colchester and I thought, "What are we living here for?"'

So she bought a £750,000 bungalow in the Fowey area. She and her daughter moved in a fortnight ago and are already as happy as a pair of clams from the local seafood shack.

Of course, June is not the only winner who has fantasised about living in an Omaze house, celebrated like mad at her amazing fortune when she won — 'I had a bottle of red in and I had that!' — and then sold it very quickly.

Susan Havenhand, 73, from Taunton, disposed of the modern £3.5million home she won on the edge of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, last June.

And Uttam Parmar, a 59-year-old operations manager from Leicestershire, sold the stunning £3million Cornish home with a hot tub and panoramic views of the Camel Estuary he won in August 2022.

In fact, so many Omaze winners cash in, that it's hard to find many — like Daren Bell, a 54-year-old technical support director from Bournemouth, who won a £4.5million beauty in Norfolk (we'll come back to him later) — who actually moved in and stayed.

And not all of it has been plain sailing.

Willowbrook House, a £2.5million newbuild constructed in a bright yellow composite Cotswold Stone lookalike in the Oxfordshire hamlet of Radford, had an unfortunate issue with flooding.

And down in Devon, Glen Elmy, a foundry worker from Walsall, and his wife Debbie spent just three nights in their new house, perched on the cliff down in Devon, before learning that, due to coastal erosion, it might in fact be over the cliff within five years and demanded the £3million instead.

All of which has led to talk of an 'Omaze Curse'.

Which, naturally, Omaze's James Oakes is having none of.

'How can winning a £4million asset be a bad thing?' he says. '"Oh no! I've now got the decision of whether I move into this incredible house, rent it out, or sell it and use all that tax-free money to change my life." What's the problem?'

Certainly, I can't see HMRC and local estate agents complaining, what with all that extra stamp duty and conveyancing fees.

And neither is June.

'It's changed everything. I can relax about the future. We can go on holidays. Everyone's mortgages are paid off.'

Omaze was founded in Los Angeles in 2012 by Matt Pohlson and Ryan Cummins after they attended a charity auction and saw the potential of 'incentivised giving' — giving to charity when there is a potential personal return — in this case the chance to play basketball with Earvin 'Magic' Johnson.

It has been hard to avoid since it launched in the UK during lockdown in 2020 — what brilliant timing when we were all shut up in our homes dreaming of

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