What is it? A pink kitchen with a soiled bunkbed in it; Where is it? Hornsey. WHICH SOUNDS LIKE HORNY; What is there to do round there? You're a couple of roads away from this amazing Turkish supermarket which is dovetailed into a bakery, and you go onto one side (the supermarket side) to buy a pot of the best hummus you've ever eaten, and then go into the other side (bakery side) to get some pillowy soft bread, and then you dip the bread into the hummus and reach nirvana, nirvana, and then you go outside and, according to police reports I just pulled up, statistically fall immediately victim to some sort of knife crime; Alright, how much are they asking? As close to a grand as it can be without actually being a grand, i.e. £949 per calendar month.
Advertisement
At what age does a bunk bed stop being exciting? Because there was a time when they were the most exciting thing in the world, and I can't remember when that stopped happening for me. The thrill of a school trip where you bagged the top bunk – and the supremacy that brings – with a well-thrown rucksack and a clear yell of "dibs". Those childhood sleepovers you had at the houses of more-middle-class-than-you children, who always seemed to have a spare room with a bunkbed in it just lying around, for sleepovers, the bunkbed adorned with dinosaur stickers you only get from the dentist. That rain-on-the-window sound of someone quietly wetting themselves into a rubber sheet above you, the wall next to your bed slowly growing warm and tacky with the run off, then the smell, the sour metallic smell. It was probably then, actually, when bunk beds stopped being exciting. It was probably exactly then.Anyway:
Normally with a London Rental Opportunity of the Week I tend to focus on the property, but along the way have a few sly digs at the photography skills of the estate agent – estate agents, recall, are essentially single-cell organisms with a medium-to-high cocaine problem and a mortal fear of doing simple administrative tasks unless they are being paid £250 cash to do them – but in this case the photography is so bad that it deserves its own section, so we will be splitting the ensuing article neatly in two:
Advertisement
ON: THE PHOTOGRAPHYI'm fucking serious, did a dog take this photo. Did a dog take this photo. Did they attach a camera to a small low dog and get the dog to take the photo. Did a dog take this photo. Did someone take these photos while lying prone on the floor. Did someone collapse and, in their few last dying moments, take these photos. Either that or a dog. Which is it.ON: THE PROPERTYSo it seems the shitheel landlord trend for 2k17 is to use the term "studio apartment" as some sort of sweeping catch-all term to allow the smallest one-room hovels – refitted and repurposed to include a kitchen, a sliver of bathroom and a bed, all at odd angles and improbable heights – and then that allows you to i. pretend that such a space is actually inhabitable and ii. charge an extortionate amount of rent for it, in this case £949.Let's zoom in on what makes this a shithole, one by one by one:
– Somebody has painted the kitchen side of the room pink in a doomed attempt to make it more cheerful, which also coincidentally is the colour psychologists tell people to paint prisons and drunk tanks to make their captives more docile, so I mean I don't know about you but I don't fancy paying £949 (a month!) to sit in a single room painted in a special way to stop me losing my entire goddamn mind and flipping things, because that's exactly what I think an extended period in here (say, eight to ten minutes) would make me do;
Advertisement
– There is absolutely no way that this sofa hasn't been the location from some extremely troubled fingering or just otherwise some incredibly skeezy sex stuff, like the world's most contained three-way, or one of those horrible cold-light-of-day coke shags, like there is absolutely no way that sofa isn't just seeping with human juice and teeming w/ regret as a result of it;– I mean, there isn't a bed, there's just a raised plinth where you can see all the MDF and pine underneath it with what I'm assuming is a mattress fitted on top of it; the dog photographs aren't explicit enough for me to tell for sure;
– For some reason the ajar door on this cupboard just extremely gives me the wobbles, I just feel like there is a very sinister back story as to why that is hanging off in the way it is;– I'm not entirely sure but I think there's an extremely thin narrow shelf that runs over the top of this radiator here to act as both a dining table (see: the chair) (you are meant to sit in this chair and somehow balance a plate of food on there and stare out of a window without jumping and eat it) and also seems to be home for the plate rack, which I suppose if this was a nice studio apartment with a nice vibe and actual space for stuff and shelves and things, if it was one of those, this would be photographed and disseminated on Pinterest as some sort of "space-saving hack", but instead is actually one of the bleakest fucking examples of storage I've ever fucking seen in my life;
Advertisement
– The fact that the toilet is installed at such a sharp abrupt angle really does indicate that it was put in there as some sort of afterthought, and it's not the first time we've seen this here on LROTW. We are five years away from toilets being described as a feature, here. We are five years away from a toilet being an added extra. You will be shown three flats by an estate agent before asking why none of them have toilets in them. "Oh, you wanted a toilet?" they'll say. "That's… you're not really in the toilet price range."
– Pretty sure that's a fire blanket installed beneath the off-centre collection of planks and wood fibre that make up the bed, and there's nothing really so soothing as a fire blanket being nailed to the wooden pole that holds your bed up, is there? Nothing says "home" like a red emergency fire blanket in lieu of a "Live, Laugh, Love" sign;– I am trying to imagine the profile of a human person who has £949 per calendar month to spend on rent (which is an eye-stinging amount), and chooses to spend it here, on this. Because this is a room for one person: there is no way that you can convince another human to share this space. So you have £949 as your rent budget – far above my own – and you choose to spend it here, on this. Sat on your sex sofa. Sleeping huddled alone in your single bunk bed. Washing your plates and drying them over the radiator. Living in Hornsey while you do it. There is no silver lining to this place. Solitude and the luxury of living alone is not worth this. So what the fuck. Who is the person who is going to pay money for this space.
Advertisement
– No, literally, let me run the maths here. The rule of thumb is you should spend no more than 30 percent of your income on rent. That is unviable in London, The World's Most Absurd City, but it's a rule of thumb, so let's stick with it here. So:
So someone pulling £37,000 down is going to choose to spend 30 percent of their income living here? No. So what if we run it at 40 percent? You need a £28,000 salary. At 50 percent you need £22,000, and you're going to be dangerously close to fucking up and going into debt pretty constantly every month if you're running at that high a rev. So who, exactly, is this flat for? Who is going to rent this? I am basically afraid for whoever gets hoodwinked into staying here, under these conditions. I am sad and scared for whomsoever can afford to spend their life on the sex sofa.@joelgolby (h/t @helenexplainsit)More from this fucking monstrous series:We Are Officially Beyond Parody NowOne Where The Shower Isn't Even Fucking Attached to the WallA Weirdly Uplifting Chat w/ a Former Tenant[1] listen I am sure there are better ways to do this but maths was never my thing alright I did two English A-Levels and IT
ORIGINAL REPORTING ON EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS IN YOUR INBOX.
By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.