Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Flat Designed By a Serial Killer in Waiting

What is it? Without order, there is mayhem; within mayhem, there is chaos. We bend the rules but we still, fundamentally, live by them. You can never bend a rule so hard it snaps: the rule is still there, stoic, solid, a cage within which we live, a scaffolding on which to build everything else we hold true. Concrete and solid ideas cannot exist without rules – strict or not – underpinning them like bones. Wipe the rules away and you have nothing but the darkness. Someone, here, put a washing machine behind a toilet.
Where is it? Tangled somewhere in the knot of Kensal (Kensal, Kensal Rise, Kensal Green), an area technically within eyes-distance of central London, but – very crucially – not.
What is there to do locally? As best I can tell, Kensal is a sort of special weird budget version of Notting Hill, where the more modern and unpopular Made in Chelsea cast members go to kick around for a bit before Daddy's Death Money drops and they can move to somewhere in Kensington, so it's got all the shit you'd want (expensive artisan bakeries, painted façade cinemas, filament bulb coffee shops) and none of the stuff you don't (crime, poors). In your case that would mean: walking without spending money around Kensal Green Cemetery, pretending you know any of the dead authors there, but you don’t because of that underwhelming C you got in A-Level English.
Alright, how much are they asking? £1,092 pcm.

There are so, so, so, so many levels of disorder to this tiny one-bed flat that I can barely keep my head from spinning off and hovering into the air like a helicopter just by looking at it, but let’s start with the kitchen, which features stairs seemingly made in the year 1 BC that have been allowed to erode and flop under the weight of millions of footsteps ever since, a single kitchen cupboard the width of a pen – which I think you can store maybe three cans of beans inside of, and literally nothing else – and a wedge of staircase-adjacent concrete that looms over the windowed door to what I'm pretty sure is the bathroom:

Behind that (same room) (you are still in the kitchen) you've got a white sofa that faces a mirrored wall so you can just sit and stare at yourself as you wonder where you'd ever fit a TV, which is next to a fridge (?) and cupboard–combo that sits in front of your only window, meaning you can neither see out of the window nor draw the curtains either open or closed behind the window (you still need to navigate a single standing column if you are going to operate the curtains), and also – as a sidebar – the curtains do not even reach the top of the window, so you have a constant source of light-leak from a window you cannot even benefit from, remotely, at all.

The ceiling? The ceiling has those sort of stiff square foam tiles you always see in cheap offices, the ones that spread brown with a mysterious stain right above your desk, which is nice, isn't it, that's a nice grid to relax under after a hard day at the same job you have to thrash yourself to death at to earn the £1,092 a month this flat somehow costs.

Back to the kitchen, again (same room) (you are still in the kitchen), and I'm pretty sure that small unit has been mounted sideways to accommodate a bulging cupboard containing an electricity meter, and also has been embedded in a kitchen counter a full foot-and-a-half below the agreed-upon level of the rest of the counter, so I suppose if you want to use that as a surface to, say, chop an onion on, then you would have to get down and do it on your knees as if you were praying to God to strike you.

Main thing, though, is someone put the washing machine behind the toilet. To swing by that one again: behind. The toilet. So, for example, we have had, in this column, washing machines in bathrooms before. We have had washing machines stacked precariously on other kitchen furniture. But the door of the washing machine has, fundamentally, always been accessible by anyone wishing to wash their clothes in it, because they can just pull it open (as you would, say, a door) and fill the drum with socks and towels.

But this machine… it is behind the toilet. You have to reach behind the toilet to fill the washing machine up. And the pre-emptiveness of this is evident in the fact that the toilet itself does not have a tank behind it, to make room for the washing machine to be installed there. (You cannot pivot a washing machine around a toilet, because a toilet is cemented into the floor and fitted to a tube: think of it like a philosophical question – "Which came first, the washing machine or the toilet?" – and realise one of Britain's qualified plumbers quite happily installed a toilet in front of a washing machine because someone asked them to).

Forget, for a moment, if you can, that this entire bathroom has been retconned into an under-the-stairs cupboard slashed in half horizontally by the angle of someone else’s staircase – so if you were to use the toilet in there you wouldn’t be able to stand up to your full height, you’d have to do your shit and sort of waddle out towards the shower bit before you could stand up fully and wash your hands. Forget all that, because to get your pants out of the washing machine you have to kneel over the toilet entirely and sort of scoop each item of clothing out one-by-one without dropping the newly-washed load all over your bathroom floor.

Every design decision present in this flat was made – not by a deliberately evil person! – but by a barely-functioning maniac, a serial killer in waiting, and we should find whichever landlord converted this single room into a compressed studio flat and put them in prison, not for crimes they have done, but for crimes they are currently planning to do. This £1,092 per month flat is not the result of a sound mind. This is the result of someone with a scattered history of aiming fireworks into ponds.

@joelgolby (h/t @Laurence_Moza)