Rental Opportunity of the Week: This Kitchen... Has a Shower In It

What is it? I wonder what this era of London will be remembered for. You weren’t there, but you can close your eyes and imagine what the city was like in the 60s (Carnaby St., really shiny Mini Coopers, Union Flags and Twiggy everywhere you looked), the 70s (cigarettes in pubs, 8p sandwiches, the booms of suburbia and tower blocks), the 80s (squats, New Romantics, looking ever forward to the future), 90s (good ecstasy and Gallagher brother weddings), the 00s (everyone in London was famous from either being in a band or being on Big Brother, everyone had collarless leather jackets and wraparound shades, everyone had the phone number of Antony Costa).

Then, uh, yeah, the teens (new media companies, Stratford International, the long slow death of nightlife). We are now three years into a decade and what, culturally and specific to our city, do we have to show for it? Every new-build block is bland and soulless and ruins an area for the three years building works take and then every flat in it is somehow £950,000 even though it’s a weird shape and doesn’t have a view. There are about six remaining postcodes that have any flavour to them. Every restaurant serves fucking oysters.

What is this city? I’m looking out at it, now, like a Batman villain: cranes, fog, stick-dead trees, huge office towers that dominate the city skyline even though you’ve never ever in your life met anyone who works in them. Really small balconies. IT workers who booked a day off when they launched the Elizabeth Line. No benches. They siphoned all the culture away and now we are staring at a dried out lakebed. The rent climbs high up to the sun. 

Where is it? Oh, right, yeah: Chiswick.

What is there to do locally? [An eerie high-pitched piercing sound, like the ambient hum you detect when you walk on the street between two skyscrapers, where it's clear that the concrete and the girders and the glass and the structure and the people all around and above you – who should not, in any way, naturally be here, not in these numbers and not in these configurations – has distorted the space irreversibly, that this patch of ground will forever be skyscrapers, even if both skyscrapers were demolished and all the souls within them scattered elsewhere. You are on Skyscraper Ground, now, and noise works differently here: Noises get absorbed into the ether, wind whips high above you, shouts bounce off flat decorative fountains. How much of the true soul of this city has been distorted in this way? Where does that energy go? Many many storeys above you, a worker eats a Pret baguette at their desk. They are afraid to not look at their e-mail for even one second]

The reality, of course, is in a city like London the effort it takes to exist during the week in a city like London means you have little to no remaining energy to go out and do anything, ever, unless you are like, the daughter of a drummer who did quite well before 2003. It doesn’t matter where you live and what you like to do because the reality is the most adventurous thing you’re ever going to do on a weekend is go to a pub, maybe a party, see that friend you haven’t seen for ages, but you’re both going to talk about work and how it’s bad and how you really should get another job, and yeah yeah; yeah we should; yeah we should do this more often, and you hug them goodbye and watch them escalate down to the Tube while you wait for a bus, and it’s 14 months before you see them again and do the exact exact exact same thing, ever and ever, anon, until they “decide to move back home” or get married to that boring person they keep tagging in photos on Instagram.

Alright, how much are they asking? £999. You can tell that the estate agents very much want to charge a four-figure monthly fee for this property, but even they can’t bring themselves to do that. That’s how bad this is. In six months’ time, this will be a four-figure a month property. If there’s any way to go back in time and make it so your dad was a drummer in a band that did quite well before 2003, now it the moment to do it

Rank these flaws in order:

— Your shower is in your kitchen; 

— Your bed is in your kitchen;

— Your sofa is in your kitchen;

— Perhaps the problem is we are too tightly defining “the kitchen”, but the majority of the furniture in the room –

— There is too much furniture in too small a room.

— The majority of the furnitures in the room are kitchen-related. The majority of the fixed furniture – fridge, kitchen cupboard, kitchen work surface, microwave stand – are kitchen-related. So primarily, if we are to come down on one side only as to what function this room has, we would not be insane to call it a “kitchen”.

— (But then of course how do you explain the bed, the sofa, the coffee table, &c.)

— So you see how having a bed, in a kitchen, is a problem…

— The shower is also in the kitchen. 

— Remember to rank these in order. 

— The shower, (in the kitchen, remember), is a see-through glass cubicle. This would not be an issue if you lived alone – I mean, it still is slightly an issue; I don’t know about you but I feel particularly vulnerable in the shower, not only because I am soft and wet and naked, but because I don’t have my glasses or contact lenses so everything is blurry, and of course we all have some ambient paranoia in the shower leftover from the movie Psycho (1960), which, even if you haven’t seen all the way through you do know the shower scene.

So basically: I think we all prefer to shower in full, safe, privacy, and doing that in an open kitchen does not seem like the vibe. But this is again assuming you live alone, which is only one option for this property: The listing asserts that the maximum number of tenants is two, so you could live with someone, should you really want to, and you would have to watch them shower in the kitchen and they would have to watch you shower in the kitchen.

This is fine in that first flush of a relationship, when you can’t keep your hands or mouths off each other. In those heady days, the shower is constantly erotic, a hard clean reset after an afternoon spent fumbling around together in bed, a glistening sudsy show that rejuvenates your sexual energy and has you both cancelling your evening plans to fuck and fuck again. But when you’re cohabiting, the dynamic changes. And I cannot imagine how that dynamic changes when you both watch each other go through the daily (now un-erotic chore) of a shower. Can You Really Love Someone When You’ve Seen What They Do In There?

— The cubicle next to the shower appears to be a cupboard.

— The cupboard door has been cut at an angle so that it can still be opened despite the slope of the roof.

— That cupboard is actually where your toilet is.

— There is no window to that toilet.

— There is no photo of that toilet.

— Imagine the state of a toilet that an estate agent is too afraid to publish a photograph of.

— (Continue to rank these, please.)

— We are still in the kitchen. 

— Between the cupboard your toilet is in and your bed (which is all in the same room as your kitchen and your shower, remember), there is a single chest of drawers. This is in lieu of a wardrobe.

— In another photo, the chest of drawers has been moved to suggest the flat has two chest of drawers in it. But it does not: Instead, look back at the bathroom. There’s now a chair and a single-sized table there. What are they for. 

— Do you think one wardrobe would have been more useful than all three of these pieces of furniture? 

— The suspicion of course is that all of the furniture in this property is, of course, London Landlord Cast Off Furniture. It works like this: London landlords collect just-about-functional furniture from wherever they can find it. London landlords do not have a strict set of morals or beliefs, but one of their iron rules is: never, where possible, pay for furniture. They will keep a wardrobe long after it has collapsed. They will let a carpet wear down to thread. Drawers collapse into one another and you just learn a new system of pulling them. Your washing machine keeps leaking but your landlord’s brother’s friend sort of trained as a plumber and he’ll be over in 6 to 10 days. Your bed has had dozens of people sleep on it. Nothing matches and nothing, in the straightforward sense of the word, “works”.

And this means that a lot of furniture is stuffed into small places simply because the landlord owns it, and therefore has to keep it somewhere, and so you have to live with it. This is why you have two chests of drawers here. This is why you have a coffee table in the middle of what is, functionally, your bathroom. This is why your bed is a spring-box frame like that, and is next to a dirty sofa. This is why there is a chair and a table next to the cupboard door that has your toilet in it, and you have to move both of them out of the way every time you want to go in there to piss and shit.

— I would rank that quite high up the list, if I were ranking them.

— Or low. I haven’t actually invented a system for ranking. Maybe we are ranking best to worst? In which case: I would put it quite low.

— It’s hard to keep track of the ranking system.

— The floor has three separate patterns to it, which in a space this small, is genuinely quite impressive.

— Look at them: there is the main floor pattern, beneath the bed and your sofa. Then there is a slightly different pattern for the kitchen area. And, in front of the shower, which is also in the kitchen: a third little patch of floor pattern.

— Why do you think that is? 

— I cannot, for instance, think of a single reason why that is.

— How many colours can four kitchen cupboard be? Go on. Answer the question before you look.

— The four kitchen cupboard here are in three colourways: matching pine-effect, matching pine-effect, clean-white, and then: clean-white with matching pine-effect.

— Two of the four cupboards match.

— If you only have four cupboard, (not many), in my opinion the hit rate should be higher than that.

— But then you remember the floor…

— And the tiles in the kitchen: some, hexagonal white. Some are just yellow.

— For some reason a single section of the kitchen wall is a completely different pattern, texture, and colour to the rest of the flat.

— To reiterate: This is an incredibly small flat. It would have been beyond affordable to decorate it in a way where, say, more than four square feet of it matched.

— (Especially as the landlord receives £999 a month in rent on this place. They have the funds to do it.)

— And yet. And yet and yet and yet.

— Rank these: the sensation of showering between bright kitchen downlighters; the sensation of waking up and seeing your partner in the shower bend down to do their most private ablutions; the soggy greasy smell of the sofa and the bed after you have cooked dinner in the same room as both of them; sliding out from under a duvet that smells like a baking tray and showering in front of someone you used to be in love with.

— Remember that it costs £999, per month, to live here.

— Remember that you are not even in the core part of Chiswick while you do that.

— (The kitchen table provided is only large enough to have one dinner plate on it at a time, but also you have to move the kettle off it, first, because that’s the only place the kettle can be while also being plugged in.)

— (There is no oven, only a microwave.)

— (There is no washing machine at all.)

— (The combination of no washing machine and no wardrobe suggests the landlord expects you to live entirely without clothes.)

— (Consider how badly dressed the landlord of this property is, based on this omission.)

— Do you ever wonder how you’d do in prison?

— I do, obviously. The answer is “badly”.

— Not just because of the social scene, there, which I am guessing would not react well to my particular brand of wordy charisma, but I will admit that is part of it.

— I don’t think British prisoners would love me, for instance.

— I am also tall but unthreatening so I would be a great target for new prisoners to beat the everloving shit out of to prove to the rest of the prison that they are not a soft touch, which is a worry.

— I think I would be hospitalised on a bi-monthly basis, for this,

— But no,

— (Rank these, still)

— The major reason I think about how I’d do in prison is what it would feel like to be condemned to such a small space, all semblances of privacy erased, just washed out green walls to look at, lads who start fires to talk to, and no particularly good access to fruit, protein, sunlight, things of that nature.

— (If you are one of those people who thinks they would “get hench” in prison, please give yourself a reality check now.)

— How would I fare after months, years, of this? The system is designed to erase thought and movement, to utterly pacify your humanity. You would come out of there broken and remade anew, but badly, shoddily, by amateur hands. No One Comes Out Of Prison As Themselves.

— Look again at the flat in Chiswick.

— It is unseemly to compare an actual flat in London to the barbaric conditions of prison as imagined by someone who has watched too many straight-to-DVD British movies, but also: Is it?

— How sane would you be after one year of showering in your kitchen?

— How happy would you be after 12 straight months of opening the specially cut shitting door that you shit behind in a lightless box

— Do you think you would leave Chiswick the same person?

— Or would you be forever changed and £11,988 poorer?

— London is designed to make you want to leave it. That much is becoming clear now. 

— There is nothing about to even stay for.

— Microwave your dinner then climb into your bed.

— Leave the shower wet and find yourself stunned to be once again inside your kitchen.

— Remember to rank these in order.

@joelgolby