Rental Opportunity of the Week: This Flat Is Literally Just a Room

What is it? Sadly this property has been removed by the agent — [lowering sunglasses] who were Foxtons, by the way – so you can no longer rent it anymore. Sorry. But before they removed it: It was a studio flat where the shower was in a cupboard.

Where is it? I mean I suppose it is still a studio flat with a shower in the cupboard, it’s just the advert isn’t actively online anymore. Like: it still exists. It’s still out there, in this city, (in Pimlico, specifically), a shower behind two cupboard doors. It still exists and if Foxtons doesn’t want to list it then someone will. So I mean—

Where is it? A good question to ask is: Did Foxtons remove the listing out of a late-onset moral panic about trying to rent a studio flat where the shower is in a cupboard, or did Foxtons remove the listing because it got taken, or did Foxtons remove the listing for some other, third reason (perhaps nobody wanted to move in to a flat that had a shower in the cupboard, so they cut their losses on keeping the listing)?

The latter option is bad – it means someone is paying to live in a studio flat where the shower is in the cupboard – but the former option is somehow worse. Some estate agents at Foxtons looked at this flat, and visited this flat, and took photographs of this flat (with the cupboard doors with the shower behind them both open, and then closed), and then they made up a price for the flat, and they listed the flat. The flat-listing website approved all of this to happen.

And then – only then – did the listing get taken down, once it had already gone up. So even if Foxtons did take the listing down for reasons of taste, and decency – presumably only by receiving a “Report” email from someone browsing the website and going, “Hold on, you know that studio flat has the shower in a cupboard, right? Do you not think that’s somewhere between mad and illegal?” – it was not Foxtons’ own inherent corporate-assigned taste and decency. It was only taken down when someone – a third-party with a moral conscience and at least one ounce of decorum – flagged that this was bad. If nobody told Foxtons the studio flat with the shower in it was bad, Foxtons wouldn’t think it was bad. That’s bad.

Are you deliberately saying “Foxtons” a lot to try and mess with their SEO a microscopic, minuscule amount A tiny bit, yeah.

You don’t really know how SEO works, do you? I’ve worked for SEO companies that don’t know how SEO works. Nobody knows how SEO works. Google is an unknowable instrument made of billions of lines of code and beating hearts plugged into brass cogs and algorithms on top of algorithms and steam that spits from hot coals, more monster than machine and one whose impulses changes from day-to-day-to-day. It cannot be understood, like the moon influencing the tides.

We know how the moon influences the tides— Just ask me how much it costs.

Alright, how much are they asking? They were asking: £1,279 PCM.

What do you want to talk about first? Do you want to talk about how the (presumably, hopefully decommissioned) fireplace opens out directly into the bed? Do you want to talk about the fact that, incredibly, there is London’s smallest kitchen there in the alcove between the fireplace and the shower, a few shelves and a toaster and a microwave and kettle (which presumably you have to fill up by— yeah you fill the kettle by opening the cupboard doors to the shower and squirting the shower head directly into the kettle, the normal way of filling the kettle) and a fridge?

Do you want to talk about the fact that someone has put a little “GB” sticker on the fridge, which seems like an irrelevant detail but you do have to wonder about the psychic place someone went into when they got a GB sticker – the “G” in “GB” of course somehow standing for “Great” – and put it on their fridge, as if you could live in a room where your fridge is between your fireplace and your shower and think: Yes, this is a Great country, Britain is Great, actually, I think that and it is something I believe, and I want to express that via the medium of a sticker?

Do you want to talk about how the smoke alarm is yellow in a way that very much suggests this room was smoked in a lot but the whole place was repainted cream-white to disguise that fact but the smoke alarm was not replaced in the great overhaul? Do you want to talk about that, maybe? Or would you rather talk about the fucking: the fucking chandelier?

Or maybe you want to talk about the fact that someone does, currently, live here, and here are their things and this is the room their things are in, and seeing it like this – the deodorant can, the power strip with cables jumbling out of it, the single table-and-chair desk combo, the oil heater and the model boat, the shelving unit, the box of cereal, the kitchen bin next to the ben, the TV in front of the window, the vitamins on the mantelpiece – seeing their things make you realise the true reality of existing as a person who owns anything in a room this small and compact and badly-designed, but that someone is right now currently enduring to do that, and that is very depressing?

Do you want to talk about Pimlico, a made up Monopoly board little place that sort of hovers greyly between Victoria and Westminster, a nowhereland, but that somehow it’s central-ish SW-ish location makes it desirable enough to, through the whirring gears of the Great British Real Estate Machine, be somehow priced at £1,279 per calendar month, for a single room, with a toilet so tiny they didn’t even take a photo of it, but that you can see on this 15 sq metre floorplan here, one of the most bewildering JPEGs I have ever downloaded off the internet?

No, none of that. We should talk about the cupboard shower. There’s a shower, in that cupboard. There’s lights fitted in it, obviously, because it’s a shower in a cupboard and cupboards don’t have natural sources of light in them. Here’s the thing, right: If you’re going to put a shower there, why put it in a cupboard? Here’s the thing, right: Can you imagine being the plumber who gets that call, to put a bath and a shower into a cupboard, to make sure nothing leaks out of it, that no water seeps in any direction out of the bath that is behind two closed doors?

Here’s the thing, right: Surely having a steamy hot shower inside a cupboard fairly rapidly causes the cupboard wood to warp around it, and fill with a black and slime-y mould? Here’s the thing, right: Do you close the cupboard doors for privacy when you’re having a shower and have someone else over? Here’s the thing, right: can you imagine how much you would psychically disassociate if you had to open two cupboard doors, step over the side of a bath to get into it, then set a shower going, inside that cupboard?

Here’s the thing, right: Cupboards aren’t even that tall. You’re in a cupboard, washing your body with soap. If you reach your arm out, you can touch the kitchen bin. You can touch your bed. You can grab your deodorant from your nightstand while being inside the shower. You can clunk your head into the top of the cupboard. You are showering directly next to your fridge. The steam rises like a pillow and tinkles softly against your chandelier. 

As the listing states, this one-bed flat is set within a beautiful period conversion. London is becoming a less aesthetic city by the day, by the second – a grey-and-glass skyscraper here, a cheapest-possible-brick new build there, the current visual language of newly erected property in this city a peculiar grey beige soullessness, one we’ll be able to point out in 20 or 30 or 40 years’ time and go: That was built in 2022. You can tell because it’s fucking disgusting, and inspires nothing.

But beautiful, neat, square little buildings from a few decades ago do still exist, and this is what is happening to them. A faceless amateurish property collective has bought them up, desiccated them into one-bed flats, and put showers inside cupboards within them. Seems like a cool thing to happen to the increasingly dwindling supply of beautiful housing stock in this city, anyway. Seems cool… and even better that it’s legal! 

@joelgolby