Rental Opportunity of the Week: Not a Living Space, But a Big Weird Shelf

What is it? A possible legal loophole that you keep banging your head on, oh not again for fuck’s SA—
Where is it? In Dalston, though in that way that it’s actually situated closer to London Fields and Hackney Central than it is actual Dalston, but here’s a thought experiment:

You are in a bar in Camden. Last orders. As the lights come up fluorescent, you can suddenly see the startling bags beneath all of your drinking companions’ eyes. Donny Tourette seems to be here. Johnny Borrell is patting down his pockets, looking for something. One of the Gallagher children looms mutely behind you. “WHAT WE SAYIN’ THEN, YEAH?” says Donny Tourette, who is always at this volume. “WHERE’S OPEN?” Johnny Borrell tries to check his phone to look at Google Maps but then remembers he made some sort of flamboyant statement about ‘phones’ being ‘prisons’ back in 2014 so ideologically he cannot get an Uber. Donny Tourette has been left unattended for more than two seconds so has started to try and light his own tongue on fire. The Gallagher Child says nothing. A few companions – ”THE TOURETTE-ETTES, I CALL THEM,” Donny Tourette told you, earlier that evening. “SLAGS.” – float around you like nymphs, talking in high elfish voices about the best places to buy vintage lace. “♪ You got to get us in a taxi / pronto ♪” Johnny Borrell croons, suddenly holding an acoustic guitar. “♪ Get on the street and see if you can get a / seven-seater ♪”

This is your moment. Choose wisely and you can solidify yourself now as a beast. You turn to the expectant audience. “Alright, lads,” you say. “Everyone back to mine, in—”

A) “—Dalston!” You chose wisely. Everyone crams into two cabs and comes back to yours, where you all have cans and one of Donny Tourettes’ incredibly sinister mates comes over with what you can only describe as ‘overproof ketamine’, and yes you miss your mum’s birthday meal tomorrow – wake up at 6pm to 20 missed calls, all-caps text from dad, ‘MUM’S CRYING, HOPE YOUR HAPPY’ – but actually that song Johnny Borrell made-up around 8 a.m. was actually very decent and you vaguely remember some handshake agreement made in Wetherspoons around midday telling the Gallagher Child that you would ‘manage their band’, so you’re excited to send some e-mails about that

B) “—Hackney!”, and Donny Tourette spits in your face, takes The Tourette-ettes and gets out of here, him and Johnny Borrell end up at some squat in Notting Hill and, you hear the next day, when they call you up still chewing their jaws collectively from the night before, and they met fucking Banksy

C) “—London Fields!”, and Johnny Borrell scoffs and makes some sort of speech – you know it’s a speech because he stands up to make it, he’s pulled an endless silk handkerchief out of somewhere and keeps using it to gesture with – actually very convincing, actually, the speech, and Johnny Borrell is going on about ‘authenticity’ and ‘the changing tectonic plates of every major city’, and how ‘fakes’ moving in to areas of ‘great gritty reality’ immediately dilute that reality and make it ‘moot’, and he goes off on a slightly too-long segue about Franco Manca for a bit and then comes back, triumphant, and finishes ‘— and that’s why cunts like you are RUINING the good old city of London!’ and everyone applauds, the whole crowd applauds, everyone stopped leaving the pub to watch Johnny Borrell eviscerate you, and the landlady walks you out — “Sorry darlin’ but you’re what’s wrong with London, plus you’re fucking barred” — and they all have an amazing lock-in which you watch through the windows for a bit – the bouncer stays up on double wages to guard the door, and even though Daisy Lowe turned up a whole hour-and-a-half after kick-out time he still lets her in, which is bullshit, why is it one rule for Daisy Lowe and another rule for you? Why does Daisy Lowe get to live such a charmed little life? – and eventually you give up and try and get one of those paper plates of Chinese food you can get late night in Camden but even they’ve stopped serving, and you go and get the night bus and even though it’s empty it’s still got that smell of goths on it, you can just sense a load of goths were here just before you, it’s still got that goth smell all over it, steam on the window with all bats drawn in it, and when you finally get home you sniff your jacket and it smells of goth. You smell like a goth.

So you see how in those circumstances you would say you live in ‘Dalston’ whereas in actuality you live in ‘London Fields.’

What is there to do locally? If I’m reading the complaints on the Nextdoor app correctly, the only viable activity around there is: go to London Fields, light a temporary barbecue, then do a full human shit into it.
Alright, how much are they asking? £1,400 p.c.m., which has actually been reduced. I don’t know what they were asking before but safe to say, ‘more than that’.

Hello here’s a shelf in a room. But no, before you start: it’s not a shelf with a bed on it. We have seen these before, these ‘mezzanine’ floors, hovering and looming over a living room, or something, a special human-sized shelf to house a flopped mattress on. But this is not that. This is a mezzanine floor above a bed. With nothing actually on it. So, I put it to the scientific community: what the fuck?

I suppose you could use that shelf to put your luggage on. I don’t know about you but I have a hard plastic suitcase that I necessarily have to own if I ever want to go on holiday, but also for five consecutive rentals I’ve not had anywhere appropriate (like a cupboard) to actually store it, so I have to keep it, filled with seasonal fabrics I don’t immediately need, old blankets or swimming shorts, wedged on top of a wardrobe, or just lurking in a corner of a room, or, as I have it now, just out on the balcony, just there, this huge moveable box that I need to own for the 14 (maximum) days of the year I need it, and for the rest of them it is just this huge ugly monolith, aesthetically haunting me at every turn.

So I suppose the mezzanine shelf could be storage, in that way, for luggage and such. But, really, do you want storage in your flat so much that you would give up a sizeable wedge of your bedroom’s headroom, and then build the appropriate walls and ladder around it that it needs, and make the storage so visible, so truly a part of the fabric of your house, that there is no room in the rest of the flat that you can’t see the storage from? Is that how badly you need storage? Or would you rather just look at your luggage all day until it turns invisible?

I’ve talked extensively on this column (go back and read every one) about the frail concept of the ‘studio flat’, and how the ideal of the studio flat is the one you see in any half-artistic film set in New York – huge windows staring out at a rain-sodden sky, a sprawling open expanse where the kitchen morphs seamlessly into the lounge moves over, far over, to the bed; the female lead walks lazily around in underwear and a white vest, until an abrupt knock on the door – but the London studio flat reality is just a small normal-sized bedroom that someone’s wedged a kitchen in. And the fault of this flat is that it actually has the potential, in size and layout, to be a halfway elegant studio flat… it’s just they’ve filled it with unnecessary walls, and a ladder, and a baffling mezzanine level in between. Knock down every wall in this flat and you have an open plan space that you could happily put Donny Tourette in, nervously adjusting his jacket collar and saying, “Yeah it’s nice this place, yeah”. Leave the walls in and he won’t even stay for a bump.

I have a theory with the mezzanine floor, though, taken from reading and re-reading the property listing. Here we go: “Exceptionally attractive flat is finished to the highest standard, throughout laminated wood flooring, new flush white paint, open planned kitchen, fully tiled bathroom suite, bespoke shabby chick (sic) furnishing, restored sash windows, bright and airy throughout and available as partly furnished,” it says. “First floor accommodation benefits from a generous size double bedroom, open plan lounge, bathroom suite, study room and also a mezzanine living area, and access to a enormous back garden (shared).” Ignore the big shed. Ignore the phrase ‘shabby chick’. Zone in on the ‘mezzanine living area’. Look at it again from this angle:

How is, uh, how is that a living area? I suppose you could climb the ladder up there, then slink onto it like a snake, and you could lounge around on some pillows or cushions you have left up there. Maybe set a laptop up in a corner and watch Netflix. But are you living, exactly? A philosophical quandary: do you need to stand up to be able to live? No, not at all. Do you need the space above your head to allow you the option of standing up, to live? I would argue that: yes. And in that definition, this is not a living space. It is a big weird shelf.

Look at the floor-plan and you’ll see the square footage of this flat includes the living space allowed by the shelf, and there, in my opinion, is the scam – if you include the floorspace of the shelf, you basically get to count the floorspace of the bedroom twice, and that takes the advertised floorspace from 412 sq ft to 517 sq ft. I don’t know where this floorspace hack logically ends – could you fill the entire bedroom with shelf-like floors, five or six of them stacked up that people can slide uncomfortably into, and report the flat as being 1,000 sq ft? – but my theory is this shelf is some sort of inelegant loophole: as the flat stands now, a 412 sq ft floorspace is a little smidge over the absolute basic minimum floorspace allowed by the government for bedsits and studio rooms (37 m sq, or 398 sq ft); putting a mad bedroom-sized shelf in there and looping it in with the rest of the floor-plan eases it easily above 500, and therefore makes it so you can viably rent it for £1,400 a month, especially if the local council calculates allowable rents based on floorspace. So that shelf isn’t for your luggage, or for you to relax on, or for your convenience: I think it’s there to make the property bigger under the contextless eye of the law, and it means you have to pay more to live underneath it, month after month after month, forever and ever amen.

Still: Donny Tourette has been up there for three straight days now, intermittently sleeping and shouting, and he’s loving it. “IT’S LIKE ONE OF THEM POD HOTELS,” he keeps saying, as you fitfully snooze beneath him. “HERE HAVE YOU GOT ANOTHER FIVER? I’VE ROLLED AND UNROLLED THIS ONE SO MUCH IT’S FALLEN APART.” It was one of the new plastic fivers, Donny. How have you disintegrated that? “INELEGANT THUMBS.” You pass him another note. Softly, Johnny Borrell sings from the toilet. You could have avoided all this if you just said you lived in Hackney. But you had to play the big bollocks, didn’t you? You had to be the big boy.

@joelgolby