London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Sofa, Under a Bed, in Notting Hill

What is it? Mate, there's a bed on top of a sofa here, there are no rules;
Where is it? Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill;
What is there to do locally? Fall in love with stuttering booksellers who legitimately say "shittety brickety", or get daggered to bits at the annual Carnival. There are no options for things to do in Notting Hill beyond those two things, that is your lot. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him if he’s got any NOS going;
Alright, how much are they asking? This might actually be the most we’ve ever seen on this column, but: I have it down as £1,344 p.c.m., which fans of money will note is "a fucking lot".

I'm increasingly starting to think that the designers and coördinators of London’s shit-hole flats are actually something close to gods or geniuses: consider, for instance, this Notting Hill flat, which is like if MC Escher designed what your dad imagines a modern prison cell to look like:

broke: a sofa and a bed should be two separate units, in separate areas of a room and indeed house
woke: no, stack ‘em up together. bedofa. so-fed.

broke: to cook a meal you need access to four hobs, a clean chopping surface area, various pans and pots, utensils and a fridge
woke: no, you need two electric burners and a really tall tap

broke: bathrooms, in my opinion, should be palatial tiled zones of calm, where the shower is big enough for you to actually move your arms in so you can wash yourself with them, and the mirror and bathroom cabinet shouldn’t be, like, embedded in a wall?
woke: lol no a shower is an overcomplicated beast of a machine that looks like it is meant to decontaminate astronauts after they’ve been infected in space. all bathrooms should essentially be optical illusions; also, you should not be able to look at a bathroom and have any fucking idea what is going on: is that a towel rack mounted at head height on a wall, I mean—

It is 2k18 and we have done unspeakable things to the word "cosy". Cosy used to mean: a wood fire, a soft blanket, low lights and a hot water bottle swaddled on each thigh. Cosy used to mean: a pile of firm–soft pillows and a glass of whiskey. Cosy? Heh: it means slipping into a onesie and getting into a freshly-made bed. Knitted socks and cashmere scarves. Being hugged by two close friends at the same time. But take "cosy" and run it through the Estate Agent Linguistic Mangler™ and it comes out to mean "small", or "very, very small", or "so small that it feels like the very walls of the place are closing in", and that’s what this is, in Notting Hill.

Because – and I hate to ruin the prestige, here – but this isn’t a studio flat, is it? It’s just a room. A room that has – cleverly and intricately – been designed to accommodate everything a flat technically needs to qualify as a flat (two ways of heating food and one way of chilling food; a place to sleep and a place to wash your foul body; a surface, for either going on your laptop or chopping carrots on; a high wall-mounted TV), but also isn’t a flat because it is a room. And not a big room, either: this single room in Notting Hill is smaller than the bedroom I currently pay around half of this rent for, and I mean, not to brag, but the wardrobe I have in my room is not just a very slender cupboard next to my microwave – it is a separate unit in a completely separate room. Or like: when I want to transition from my sofa to my bed, I don’t just roll my body, inexplicably, up and over the back of the sofa: I actually have to get up on my legs and open two doors to get to it. I do not have a very small kettle-and-tea-making shelf in my bedroom, sort of how I imagine a Travelodge built inside purgatory might look. For fun, I go to my living room and play PlayStation, instead of sitting on a sofa and staring at a gigantic rendering of the word "HOME".

At this point in the LROTW tradition, someone will pop up in the Facebook comments section and say something like: ah, this isn’t that bad though. As long as you keep everything immaculately tidy and exactly in the place it is designed for, and also you don’t have anything more than like two coats and one pair of trousers that need hanging up, this is a very ideal space. Shut up moaning, you horrid large boy. Or: a boomer architect will go: what will vile millennials do with any more space than this! Fill it with avocados, I prithee!

Which: yes, both valid points. It is possible to live a fine and normal life within a very compact studio flat, if you want that and you crave that solitude so much. But also: this costs one entire thousand, three actual hundred and forty-four fucking pounds every month to rent. If you have that kind of cash lying around – per month! – might I suggest you rent somewhere that isn’t just a room? That isn’t just, like, a bed on top of a sofa and a microwave? Somewhere that’s actually cosy, and not just saying cosy as an synonym for small?

Don’t let me tell you how to live your life – honestly, I will ruin it for you – but please, please: do not spent a grand-and-a-half a month living in a luxury prison in Notting Hill. You can do better than this.

@joelgolby