Home, small home
Simon Davis squeezes into some of the tiniest properties on the market The average price per square foot of residential property in London’s Kensington and Chelsea now stands at £1,010, which is barking. (Incidentally, it’s a mere £220 per square foot in Barking and Dagenham, £760 in Westminster and £530 in Richmond). On a quiet night last week I worked out that to own some floor space the size of a postage stamp in the Royal Borough costs £38. I should get out more. For some reason small properties are often compared with postage stamps, and given the astronomical price of London houses it’s to small properties that many of us now look. As more and more people move out of the capital to go and live in the country, or Bulgaria or France, lowmaintenance, glorified ‘hotel suites’ are increasingly desirable. Incidentally, Bulgaria is the new property hotspot. A large fivebedroom house there can cost as little as £23,000 — but that’s another story.
The smallest apartment I know of in London is in Pembridge Villas in Notting Hill. It is 7ft 6in by 3ft 4in and contains a kitchenette, a shower and a wardrobe. It costs £135 a week and is currently occupied, I gather, by a woman who is 5ft 2in. It used to be a cupboard and she likes it because of its location and proximity to good restaurants — a factor that I imagine is key unless you happen to like eating on your own, standing up.
If you want compact but liveable, then there is a studio flat for sale in Bayswater that is 201 sq ft and costs £175,000. It is renovated and located on the sixth floor of a white stucco-fronted building. There’s a kitchen (with washing machine and fridge), a slick bathroom, and the main room has lovely vistas over trees. A real room with a view.
If you want to be in Chelsea — and many people still do — there is a seventh-floor studio for sale in Sloane Avenue Mansions that is 285 sq ft. It’s near the King’s Road and is just one room with a separate bathroom and arguably the smallest kitchen in London, measuring 4ft 6in square. It costs £235,000 and is on sale with Cluttons (020 7584 1771). To my mind, one of the best studios on the market is on Basil Street near Harrods. It is purpose-built, in a portered block and it even comes with a small garden. The 46-year lease is on sale for £249,950 with Douglas & Gordon (020 7225 1225). However, this flat lacks originality. For that you need to head to the more outré environs of east London. Bridewell Place is in Wapping, which makes it excellent for City and Canary Wharf workers. It’s a gated former factory built around a cobbled courtyard. The ground-floor studio runs to a relatively whopping 394 sq ft with a sitting-room and separate bathroom. This is on the market for £235,000 with Knight Frank (020 7480 6848).
Big things happen in small places. Just look at Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who started their internet site YouTube in a tiny garage and sold it for $1.5 billion. Good things will almost certainly happen in The Studio, 16a Gunter Grove, SW10. This former artist’s studio is 710 sq ft and boasts two bedrooms suspended on a mezzanine above the sittingroom and accessed by a spiral staircase. There’s an open-plan kitchen and a bathroom, and a spectacularly small study/bedroom that measures 9ft by 5ft. It is immaculate and cost £545,000. It’s on with John D. Wood & Co in their Chelsea office (020 7352 1484).
If all this talk of small properties is too much to cope with, then I draw your attention to Witanhurst. After Buckingham Palace, this is the largest house in the metropolis and sits smugly on a five-acre plot in Highgate, north London (Knight Frank, 020 7431 8686). It was designed by George Hubbard for Sir Arthur Crosfield, who cleaned up with one of the country’s largest soap companies. It has 25 bedrooms and is on sale for about £32 million. The house is 40,000 sq ft, which could quite easily accommodate most of the studio flats now on the market in London.
On a rough calculation, Witanhurst works out at under £800 per square foot. Bargain.
Simon Davis is features editor at the London Evening Standard.
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