This Year's London Apartment

We decided to try a different apartment this fall from the one we’ve rented for the past three years. It’s only a six-minute walk from the previous one, so it’s equally close to the Gloucester Road underground station while the grocery store of choice is a different one, bigger and a bit better. We can easily go to our preferred restaurants and pubs from prior years but will also be positioned to find new favorites. 

Our flat is the bottom two floors of a townhouse that looks from the outside as if it must be large and grand, but in fact the building is quite shallow and all our rooms are small. I paced it off and found that the total interior measurement is 19 feet wide, which is a good standard width, the same as the first house we owned in London back in the 1970s, but it's only 24 feet deep, while that house was at least 40 feet deep. We enter the righthand door between those columns, and we have the street level and the floor below it .

The flat is the pied-à-terre of an Italian woman and is managed by two young Italian women. It appears to have been renovated fairly recently, maybe around twenty years ago—the eat-in kitchen and bathrooms particularly—and though small it is attractive and pleasant.

The rather elegant, comfortable living room, on the main floor, has twelve-foot high ceilings and large windows as well as a decorative (nonfunctioning) fireplace. It's also where the dining table for six is located. Much of the wall art in the living room and main bedroom consists of sets of Chinese prints of flowers, and in the upstairs hall there's a set of bird prints.

Downstairs is where the bedrooms are, along with a full bathroom--good sized, with marble tiles over the tub and attractive dark woodwork--and an additional WC (there's a third WC with a tiny shower on the main floor), and a washer-dryer in a closet. It's the typical European kind that dries so inefficiently that it's much better to hang clothes to dry. The only place downstairs where there's enough room to set up the drying rack is the main bedroom.

It’s always interesting in each new rental to observe the features that different cultures or individuals deem necessary or desirable in living quarters.The laundry drying situation is one that we are now used to after years of experience, and plumbing issues like low water pressure and hard-to-manage hot water temperature can happen anywhere. Therefore here the primary wrinkle is the heating system, which Steve thinks is characteristically Italian, designed to produce as much warmth as possible in this chilly country. He has been working assiduously to control the heat to a point that he considers cool enough for sleeping, by turning down the thermostat, turning off most of the numerous radiators and at times opening windows. After three nights he may have succeeded; between that and the abating of jet lag, he slept much better last night.

The staircase down to the bedroom floor makes a cramped U-turn that is potentially hazardous in its steepness. I conjecture that the two WCs, one directly above the other, were added at some point in the past few decades in the part of the apartment where the staircase originally made a more leisurely descent. In light of the nasty fall I had nine years ago in an apartment in Rome, I am especially careful on staircases, and as it is possible to hold a railing or bannister for the entire flight up and down, nobody needs to worry about us on these stairs.

For me, the intriguing intercultural difference is the electricity. This flat is equipped with a substantial number of wall outlets, the three-flat-prong kind that are standard in the UK, and we have several adaptors so that we can charge our US devices. The wall outlets have on-off switches, and while it is not always crystal clear which position is off and which is on, we find that in the majority of the outlets in this flat, neither one provides juice. Most of the time there are three outlets together, a double one and a single one (I don't know what that fourth thing is supposed to be for, but it may be for a telephone line), and so far I have found that in every case only one out of three works in the sense of providing power. I've tried them switched back and forth between whichever position is on or off, and I've tried them with US devices and with the UK hair dryers that are present in the bathrooms, and one out of three works in each case so far.The young women who manage the flat know about this, we're pretty sure, because an electrician had been working here shortly before our arrival. Maybe this was the best he could do. It doesn't matter greatly, as we can generally find somewhere to charge our devices, but it's just rather comical.

Speaking of hair dryers, you're no doubt aware of the danger of dropping electrical appliances into water, such as a bathroom sink or tub, and to guard against this, European electrical codes (maybe not everywhere, but often) permit only the low-powered outlets for electric shavers to be installed in bathrooms, or within some distance, maybe a metre or two, of a tub or sink. So in a small bathroom with no three-prong outlet, how does one dry one's hair? There is nowhere on the lower floor where a functioning wall outlet is anywhere near any mirror, let alone one in the bathroom.

I coped today by resorting to the second bedroom, where the one working outlet of three is across the room from a display of postcards, framed with reflective glass. In the tiny upper bathroom there isn't even a shaver outlet, but one could stand in the front hall and use the very foxed mirror there. As you can see, there are two outlets in the wall right there, and mirabile dictu, they both work!