Rental Opportunity of the Week: The Wildest Example of 'Landlord Brain' Yet

What is it? The shortest answer to this question I can conjure is: They remodelled a staircase to make it into a flat, and if you didn’t think that was quite bad enough as a concept, to do that they had to open up a special weird balcony hole between the two floors to let enough light in, and that is by the window, so necessarily the curtains from upstairs dangle down into your kitchen pit downstairs. 

What? Yeah.

What? Yeah. No, yeah. 

So, sorry, hold on: run it by me just No I get it, I’m struggling too.

So the curtains— the curtains are upstairs, by the flat’s only window. You follow that so far?

I do. So the flat is essentially just a staircase through an upright space, but it has been bisected through the middle by a mezzanine floor, so it can accommodate a bed –

I don’t like it but I am with you so far — but if they didn’t open up a hole in the mezzanine floor/ceiling to let light in from the upstairs window, the downstairs kitchen would be shrouded in absolute darkness, like a basement.

And to get around that they—? They cut a hole in the floor/ceiling, cordoned it off with a little boxed railing, and let the curtains dangle through from the upstairs to the downstairs.

[really deep breathing sound, like Tony Soprano rage-eating a sub sandwich in a sauna] Yeah no I know.

OK well I guess… you know I guess like. I guess at least the rest of the flat isn’t something insane like – and I’m making this up entirely off the top of my head, right? – at least it’s not something insane like, “completely covered in tiles, every single surface covered in tiles” – Right. Yeah… ah

It’s… it’s not, is it? Are you crying?

No? OK it is a little bit completely covered in tiles, every single surface covered in tiles, yeah.

[sighing for a 30 seconds straight in stunned silence, very much like my mum and dad did whenever they came home from Parents’ Evening] Right and where is it What?

Where is it? Vauxhall.

Yeah. And what is there to do locally? Vauxhall is just a very confusing one-way system that is the most lucrative spot in London for Uber drivers to make pick-ups between the hours of 5 and 7AM every weekend and a bit of Monday too.

Alright, and how much are they asking? £840 PCM.

I think we should just: I think we should just look at it. These are grainy, quite blasted-out photos, I must warn you, but there is something inherent about the flat in the quality of the .JPEG – just like the best pubs have the worst toilets, so the most miserable flats always have the lowest quality images of them on the listing. It’s just an immutable truth, and we can’t get around those. So:

Sometimes it gets a little same-y, this column, I will concede that. There are only so many ways you can say, “they’ve put a bed in a kitchen, again, and guess what: it costs a lot”. But then if you stop thinking about it as “an entertaining 1,200 words to read when you’re avoiding doing work” and instead take it as “a constant weekly temperature-check on the state of the housing market”, it does kind of work, because: the flats never go away. They never recede, they never improve. I rarely have to scroll too deep into Zoopla or Gumtree to find something appalling, either in its smallness or its mediocrity or its impracticality.

If you’ve tried to rent, recently, you’ll know that somehow, due to alchemy, the chaos of the last two years – remember when 70 percent of the country like, de facto lost their jobs? Remember all that? Remember how we’re only just clawing our way out of that pandemic, but due to the stamp duty freeze, loads of people bought their way out of renting (it is always surprising to discover some friends of yours just “have” £120,000, isn’t it), and somehow, with inflation and house prices going up and a pause in new housing stock being built and because rental assets and appreciating – so somehow rent is not only going up very drastically but now the sheer opportunity to pay that excessive rent is now a hoop-jumping, desperate, elbows-out battle against other potential rentees.

That is mad, isn’t it? That is mad, that that is allowed, to happen. How after all that, the already-being-stiffed rental generation are getting it again. And through all that, the flats have got smaller, more dreadful, more items of kitchenware infringing on the bedroom, more huge looming wardrobes, &c., and I have logged on every week and gone: Look, bad. The horror of the rental market, which rises instead of receding, can get a little bit repetitive, I know.

BUT HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A HOLE CUT IN A CEILING SO THAT THE CURTAINS CAN DANGLE THROUGH IT INTO THE KITCHEN. I MEAN. FUCK! FUCK, MAN! COME ON!

Once again I like to imagine what this flat was before it was carnage, and I’m pretty sure it was just a stairway. Necessarily, this means whatever part of the property that has been boarded off to make this into a flat now has to have its own stairway built into it, so people can get upstairs, but that is a problem for another day. So what has happened to the stairway is: Someone realised it was just about open and airy enough so that, maybe, if you built an incredibly impractical mezzanine floor into it, it could just about house a bed. Is it worth looking at the other individual insane facets of this property? Yes, probably:

— The huge and quite retro built-in wardrobe is, essentially, unusable on one entire side, because the railing around the hole in the floor – which you have to reach over to draw an open the curtains, by the way – blocks off any doors or drawers from opening there. So that’s good.

— There fundamentally is no kitchen, despite so much of the downstairs section being made out like a kitchen – kitchen work surfaces, kitchen cupboards, on the back wall, a fridge. But the actual kitchen part of the kitchen – i.e., the large device that might warm and heat up food – does not exist beyond a single microwave. Tell me: Does one microwave necessitate an entire room-circling work surface, a dining table and two chairs, and at least three cupboards and two shelves’ worth of storage? There is no freezer beyond whatever compartment is in the fridge. There is no washing machine at all. This is essentially “The Microwave Room”.

— This is a complete side note, but once I noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it: the surface around the bathroom sink is not a bathroom surface, that is an off cut of kitchen surface. It just radiates dark, kitchen energy. That is a surface designed for someone to chop a tomato on. It is not for hand soap and toothbrushes. You can tell this because it does not match a single one of the flat’s many, many, many, many many tiles.

— I… yeah. I don’t even know what to say about the tiles. There are a lot of tiles. Tiles are a taste thing, and I often rally against landlords’ grey-and-white un-taste, which is so bland as to be dreadful in its own right, so at least this place is doing something interesting by putting tiles and mirrors on every possible surface that isn’t a bed or a wardrobe or a curtain. At least there is that. But also “interesting” and “insane” can very often overlap, and I do feel quite strongly that that has happened here.

— The bathroom appears to be a do-what-you-want-! wet room, which in a space this small is actually technically a very practical decision, especially compared to other properties we so often see out here: How many times could a bathroom be improved by removing all of the shower walls and just sorting the drainage out properly? How often could a bedroom be made 30 percent bigger by just removing the wall that makes up a useless hallway?

Landlords, it seems, often make properties based on a tick list, rather than what is practical and makes sense, and that is why every furnished property has an ugly and ungainly table. But this very small wet room also opens immediately into the kitchen/microwave room, which is less than ideal and might even be bordering on “fairly unsafe”. I mean, you just bust out the shower in a plume of steam and floor-wet and immediately press buttons on a microwave to reheat a lasagne. It’s not a cool way of getting electrocuted to death, but it is an effective one. 

— Every single stair in this place looks like it was made individually by a different person and every single one of those people had, only just, been taught the concept of stairs and what stairs do and how stairs work. This is like when I was in Design & Tech in Year 9 and tasked with making a CD tower, which I measured and built and glued together out of wood to be the perfect – exact perfect! – size to accommodate a CD stack. But I had not accounted for the very small change in internal space that a heat-formed sheet of plastic would add – only a millimetre thick, maybe! Only a half-millimetre thick! – that made up the little shelves inside the box.

Anyway: Once I glued those in place it was impossible to get a single CD album in there unless you pushed it very carefully at a very precise angle and then never wanted to get it out again, and when I got the mark back for that (an inexplicable C) I realised: I am a thick dipshit and I should never build anything ever again. Hence: writing. Anyway, long story short, there is an alternate universe where I went on to become the very inept moron who made every stair in this house. 

— I just keep coming back to it, my eye keeps being lured towards it: They put a special hole in the ceiling so the light from the window could get in, and let the curtains dangle through! To accommodate the design insanity of that hole, they had to install a protective railing upstairs, so you didn’t fall into your kitchen every morning when you opened your curtains!

Truly: was that the only solution to the problem of making this staircase into a flat? Was this the only way around this? At what point do you look at the staircase you made into a flat, with a hole in the ceiling for the light and curtains to dangle through, and ask yourself: “Am I a bad person? Have I gone against the natural order of things? Did I play at being God, and bandy around too close to the sun?'“ Dr. Frankenstein figured out he had fucked up. Why can’t a single London landlord!

— I’m laughing. I’m laughing, actually. It’s not screaming, it’s laughing. It’s actually really funny that they’ll probably find a renter for this place, and in doing so, think it makes sense, and start scouring around for another staircase to do this to. It’s actually good and funny and I’m not even mad about it at all. At all!

@joelgolby