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'Table-sized flat' for £170,000

B

BoyBach

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Feb 24, 2006
3,031
13
A flat roughly the size of a snooker table has gone on sale for £170,000 in London's upmarket Chelsea.
The former janitor's storeroom measures 11ft by 7ft and has a cupboard place for a shower and kitchenette area.

Potential buyers can expect to fork out an extra £30,000 to make the room habitable as there is no lighting and it is full of rubble.

Even the estate agent selling the property admitted the flat was "incredibly depressing".

"We have to go in with a torch because the lights do not work and it is full of rubble," Jason North, associate director at Lane Fox.

Nevertheless, the flat is expected to attract buyers due to its close proximity to the fashionable bars, shops and leisure facilities of Kensington and Chelsea.

In fact, the £170,000 price tag may make it one of the few affordable properties in what is London's and the UK's costliest borough.

According to research from property website Rightmove, released on Monday, the average asking price for a house in Kensington & Chelsea in January was £1,145,791.
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- BBC


Does this prove that 'Location, Location, Location' is everything?

Or has the world finally gone completely stark-raving bonkers?
 
Wow, that IS depressing.


I can't wait to hear about the loser who was so desperate to live in a nice area, that s/he paid £170,000 + £30,000 for what is essentially a prison cell. What's the point of owning a flat in a ritzy area if you're going to own the dodgiest place in the area? As impressive as the location is, nobody will be impressed if they get a chance to see the room itself.

And talk about small. Imagine not being able to take a shower without getting your bed soaked. :p

Or, "One night, I got up to take a piss. It was dark, and my aim was a bit off, and..... I hit my kitchen table!"
 
I was just in London today and it's $14 for a drink, $20 for a small lunch, etc. etc.

It's insane. As absurd as this sounds, after visiting the city...I can see it. Beautiful place, though, even if I spent about $200 in a day and a half just on food and drink. (And I was trying to save money!)
 
Policar said:
I was just in London today and it's $14 for a drink, $20 for a small lunch, etc. etc.

It's insane. As absurd as this sounds, after visiting the city...I can see it. Beautiful place, though, even if I spent about $200 in a day and a half just on food and drink. (And I was trying to save money!)
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It's perfectly easy to live in London cheaply. In fact, life in London can be cheaper than other cities in the UK. The only things you can really do nothing about is rent and travel (unless you know which buses are 'free').

I've perfecting the dirt-cheap London experience for three years now. I seek pleasure in a challenge :D
 
What if the buyer likes snooker? Will they just have the table and nothing else?
 
Just came across this – some Google Sketchup plans for making better use of the space:

378022201_ac03ba1fb0.jpg


Linkety
 
It's not even the most expensive per square foot, a place in Mayfair that was smaller went for proportionately more. :eek:

It's silly. And unsustainable.

Lau said:
Just came across this – some Google Sketchup plans for making better use of the space:
Click to expand...

I'd design a flexible system, using sliding partitions. I think with clever design it'd be more than just habitable.

Or maybe go for a variation on this.
 
it's not the end of the world... about the size of a dorm room. The only problem is that you have to fit a bathroom and stove into it as well as your bed and dresser and such... that part could be difficult.
 
Surely the only people who could purchase that are owners of adjacent apartments looking to extend. I mean, on its own it's completely useless.

Wouldn't you rather live a short walk away in Battersea and have the extra space? You could get a decent sized studio for that money there.
 
FleurDuMal said:
Wouldn't his head hit the ceiling when he stood up?!
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It's a 10 foot ceiling. So either a 6 foot high main compartment, and a bedroom that is just under 4 foot high (after allowing for the thickness of the floor), or a 7 foot high main room and a 3 foot high bedroom/coffin.

I grew up in a cornish farmhouse that was about 600 years old, and I think the celing was probably about 6 foot high, or a few inches over, so it's doable.

I can see a rich parent buying this chelsea rathole as an investment and crash pad for their student sprog. Or as somewhere round the corner to put up their housemaid / au pair.

Or some guy with a house/family in the country and a job in London buying this as a London pad to sleep in monday-friday, and back to the countryside for the weekend.
 
Policar said:
I was just in London today and it's $14 for a drink, $20 for a small lunch, etc. etc.

It's insane. As absurd as this sounds, after visiting the city...I can see it. Beautiful place, though, even if I spent about $200 in a day and a half just on food and drink. (And I was trying to save money!)
Click to expand...
So... which London were you visiting?! You could easily do lunch with a drink for half of what you paid today.
 
They aren't really called flats either. It's apparently from the old scottish word flet meaning floor or interior.

If you open your copy of the Lord of the Rings, when the Fellowship visit the Elves, JRRT consistently refers to their treehouses as flets. Eg:

"Gloin climbed up into the flet."

Noticed that a couple of days ago when I was re-reading LOTR :)

Some more info:

http://www.word-detective.com/111703.html
Dear Word Detective: From whence is the word “drum” derived, as used in London English slang for a flat (an apartment) or house, often heard as “Come round to my drum” or “Let’s go over to your drum”? Similarly, why is a wristwatch referred to as a “kettle”? -- Andrew Houston, Kent, England.

Not so fast, buckaroo. You know darn well that's actually three questions, since I can't get away with explaining "drum" and "kettle" without delving into "flat" for our non-Brit readers.

While few Americans not permanently addled by overexposure to PBS routinely refer to their apartments as "flats," it has been standard usage in Britain since the 19th century. One might logically assume that, because most "flats" occupy a single story of a building, the word simply comes from the "flatness" of the abode, and one would be largely correct. But "flat" in this sense is actually derived from the obsolete Scots word "flet," meaning "floor" or "interior of a house" back in the 15th century. Then again, that "flet" was derived from the same Germanic root as our modern adjective "flat," so you can probably safely ignore that little Scottish detour.

"Drum" as slang for "flat" or "home" is, however, a bit less straightforward. The Oxford English Dictionary seems to think that this usage is derived in some mysterious fashion from the musical instrument sense of "drum," dating to the 16th century and derived from the German "trommel." But the eminent etymologist of slang Eric Partridge felt that this 19th century slang use of "drum" to mean "home" probably came from the Romany word "drom," meaning "road" (possibly derived from the Greek "dromos"). A slang sense of "drum" as "road" did indeed appear in early 19th century England, and the "home" sense was probably an outgrowth of this usage. The Romany origin of "drum" also makes sense, as Romany was the language of the Gypsies who played an important role in the underworld of 19th century London.

"Kettle" in the "big pot" sense is a very old word, derived from the Latin "catinus," meaning "deep pan for cooking." The use of "kettle" to mean "watch" first appeared in the argot of thieves in the 19th century, and apparently first referred to the large pocket watches popular at that time. The shape and heavy metal construction of old pocket watches makes likening them to kettles only a slight stretch, and a thief specializing in watches was known in the early 20th century as a "kettle banger."
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jonharris200 said:
So... which London were you visiting?! You could easily do lunch with a drink for half of what you paid today.
Click to expand...

Round the corner from me there's a small cafe called Baker and Spice. Nice food. Various TV and film people go there. My step mum treated me to a birthday lunch there - we had salad. You points to what you wants, they plonks it on your plate.

Then.. they weighted our plate and charged us by the gram :eek: A small place of salad was £20 ($40) :eek: :eek: :eek:

For the three of us, it was £60, plus drinks for 3 small plates of salad. Bloody hell, never went again.

No wonder it's popular with stingy brit supermodels who don't mind splashing out a fiver on a cabbage leaf or happily pay £60 for a couple of grams of something illegal.

Opposite is a fish and chip cafe. £1.20 for a massive helping of chips, and if I want to splash out, another 60p for a pot of mushy peas or curry sauce.

Delicious on the way home from work or partying :)
 
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