Rental Opportunity of the Week: Nothing About This Flat Is 'Clever'

What is it? Another sleep shelf. Bad I have to say “another” like that, isn’t it? In a normal world I should be really outraged that I’m looking at a special mezzanine shelf designed to have someone sleep on it. Instead, I’m mentally ranking how bad it is compared to all the other sleep shelves I’ve seen in the past 14 months. ‘Not even the worst sleep shelf,’ I’m thinking, right now. ‘As sleep shelves go, it’s actually very tastefully finished.’ Good. Normal. 
Where is it? Forest Hill – “It’s Not Dulwich, And We’re Fine With That!”
What is there to do locally? Forest Hill is home to two of the most sinister pubs I’ve been to in London: first, one of the all-time bad vibes Wetherspoons I’ve ever used the app in, a darkly lit hellpit along the main drag; then a sort of mystery pub that I can no longer find on a map or remember the name of, as if it got wiped from my memory (by a pool ball to the skull? By a shot of greasy homebrewed vodka?), where I went to meet a friend to watch the football during a sleepy Christmas-time lull, and every round somehow cost less than a fiver and the game was on about 19 screens along the bar, and everyone there was unhappy in that way that tipped dangerously close to anger, and they all had Old Man Pub Faces – there are Pub Faces, haggard things that hang off skulls to get nearer to the foam of their pints, and there are Old Man Pub Faces, strange ageless things beneath tufts of white hair and flat caps and loose flakes of scalp, noses that go on forever – and all the Old Man Pub Faces kept turning to look at us, pissed off, sour as if they’d just whiffed shit, and also (a sign of a bad pub, in my opinion) all of the beer mats were wet. Do you know what pub I’m talking about? Slide into my DMs, I’d quite like to go back. 
Alright, how much are they asking? £790 pcm, all bills included. (*1)

Before we look at this flat I’d like to pull a line from the property listing, which I don’t ordinarily do because landlords and listing agents communicate like no other animal on Earth; they type like they are shouting buzzwords down a phone to a primitive transcription machine, they type like they stomped with their feet on an old mechanical keyboard and whatever came out got faxed in a death threat font to the President. Here’s the line in bold:

OK, and so here is the flat. Spot, if you can, the canny and devilishly clever design features that the person here is talking about:

I’ll try to talk you through the clever design features I have noticed: first, the most vertically erratic kitchen work surface I’ve ever seen, a big dipping alcove beneath the oven hood that suggests an oven should be beneath it (but there is no oven, so supposedly you have to buy… your own…. microwave–hob combi? It is unclear); the work surface dent cum microwave gap is directly next to your wardrobe, which is built in to your kitchen unit, which I suppose would be quite clever, if you were designing, say, a prison cell; the upstairs mezzanine shelf has a skirting board (why?) (why???) around it, and built-in shelves, so it would actually be quite a nice little room if it wasn’t squashed to the same proportions Bugs Bunny goes to when he gets whomped on the head with a mallet; and then, the clever design piece de resistance, a loft ladder that leads up to the mezzanine shelf but, very crucially, hooks and unhooks in place, because if the ladder were a permanent feature then you wouldn’t be able to comfortably walk in and out of the door of the flat.

So, to clarify: this flat’s most clever feature is a ladder you have to take up to your bedroom, and when you’re not in your bedroom you have to unhook it from the wall and hang it up on a special ladder hook, for ladders. You cannot leave the flat unless you do that.

So it is fair, obviously, to say that I don’t think the design of this flat is particularly clever, and I think the word clever is being used as a very knowing spin on the word shitholesque, and I don’t think we should allow such language abuse to go unchecked. I suppose a ladder that unhooks and hangs on its ladder hook is a clever solution to the problem of getting on your bed shelf if you have already invented the problem of a bed being on a shelf in the first place, but I think one small act of malicious cleverness does not disguise one much larger act thereof.

Your bed is a shelf, in this flat. The rest of the flat’s floorspace is basically given over to having room to move around your kitchen. Your flat is a kitchen with a bed shelf above it, and a bathroom. You can’t put a sofa anywhere in this flat, unless there is some clever solution to having a sofa, like it folds neatly up into an alcove in the wall every time you are not using it. I suppose if you are able to hide every single component part of the place you live in the exact moments you aren’t actively using them, then yes, every shithole flat could be bought up to the standard of “clever”, but this isn’t, and also very crucially I think it would be a bad place to have a house party. All your mates stood clutching cans in your kitchen. Staring up at the shelf you’re having slithering little house party intercourse on. Waiting for you to hook your ladder back on and clamber down so you can change the playlist on Spotify. Not a great vibe, is it? 

Another thing I don’t trust is a landlord’s ability to fairly round up a bill payment into a rental agreement. I mean, the offer here is basically “you can use my broadband, if you can pick up the WiFi signal through the floor underneath you”, isn’t it. I don’t particularly see any options to control temperature, so it would appear that heating is a crapshoot (your house is basically as hot as whoever living downstairs decides it is).

You pay bills because it means you have access to amenities, and because you have to. This arrangement splits the convenience of both and somehow makes it worse and more expensive. Is that clever? I don’t know. Words don’t have meaning anymore. By all means sleep on a cunning little shelf in Forest Hill and leech off your landlord’s WiFi, but I think there are far better options, up to and including just dying and living in a grave.

@joelgolby

(*1)  Direct quote from the listing: “Very good value when ALL BILLS taken into account”. I have to say, landlords congratulating themselves for offering you “very good value” for a shelf above your doorway causes some genuine dissonance for me, about what words mean (is “very” meaningless? Is “good” meaningless? Is “value” without meaning?) and how we attach those words to meaning. Ferdinand de Saussure spinning in his little Swiss grave because landlords finally murdered the last solid idea that underpins the philosophy of language. Everything we say now is just meaningless grunts.