London Cribs: Flat 4!

(Making the “CRIBS” series oh-so-much more posh)

So, ok, everyone’s doing their “cribs” entries, and I decided to up the street cred of this business by providing our group with an international address. Because, honestly, cribs is all about the celebrities with the random houses in other countries. Wolman/McCoy? The AMRs?! My spacious flat in London puts them to shame. Eat your heart out, Housing and Dining Services.

Flat 4, Beaumont court. A legendary flat if ever there was one. We solidified our reputation of awesomeness a few weeks ago when we threw our “movie character theme party” and had over 100 people crammed into the flat.  It was so legendary that the head of the housing department came in on Monday morning along with our cleaning lady to observe the now-disastrous state of the carpet herself. Impressive.

Let’s start at the door. As you can see, movie posters adorn the front entryway- another sign of Flat 4’s influence. Luke and Alex are in charge of a movie screening society here that is currently putting on a “90s film festival”. Trainspotting was the first film they screened, and the general opinion of the society is that Trainspotting is the “Best British Film Ever”. Seven was screened last week, and Natural Born Killers was this week’s film. As you can see past the door, there’s a heinous orange door on the right- the door to the kitchen. London is obsessed with fire doors and fire regulations and fire control: leftover paranoia from when their whole city burned down. So, we get an orange door to remind us that it’s extra-special and fire proofed, and to also make coordinating any type of color scheme that much more impossible.

Passing in to the kitchen, you can see the huge amount of space we have to cook. It’s actually quite impressive for a London flat. We have a huge window that looks out onto the main walkway our building is on, which is nice when friends come to visit- you can just chuck the keys out the window down to your friends below. Notice the festive roses for Valentines day? Yeah, Cheyenne and I like to add that “domestic goddess” element to our flat of 3 guys.

Someone with a very bad design aesthetic decided that one wall of each kitchen should be painted a bright color, so the horrible orange from the door spills over onto the wall. Fortunately, we’ve managed to cover a lot of it with posters. That huge UK map on the right was a purchase I made when every single flat visitor told me where in the UK they were from and I had no idea where they were talking about. The posters in the middle are from the Liverpool and Arsenal football teams, proudly displaying which teams our flat supports. (Warning: Obligatory team bashing ahead) Chelsea SUCKS!

Here you can see the 2 (count em, 2) kitchen chairs that have broken and have found a new home atop the freezer. One of them broke while I was sitting on it, like a cheesy cartoon gag. Many thanks go out to whatever loon in the housing department was in charge of chair purchasing which effectively put me in the same category as elephants or other heavy cartoon creatures. 

Here’s our hallway!. Our rooms are all off of this central corridor. On the right you might be able to make out the yellow poster- it’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poster. If you ever had your doubts about how cool our flat is, they should have just vanished at the TMNT reference. Further down near the guys’s rooms are posters that we got free for a week with the newspaper- “Pets!”. Posters of dogs, fish, cats, amphibians. We’ve spiced up the posters a bit by assigning all the animals names to correspond to our friends and flatmates. Pretty awesome.

Now, on to the bedrooms! Here’s the door to my room , complete with “half naked Daniel Radcliffe newspaper cutout from the feature story on Equus, the West End play he’s in with a nude scene” goodness. I didn’t cut it out, Kenny did, and somehow the flat has decided that I’m illegally interested in Daniel. Not so, but I find the cutout hilarious so it’s staying up there.

Here’s my desk, which is this big built-in in the wall on the left of the room. The grey corkboard is awesome for pinning up all of my theatre and symphony ticket stubs and programs. If I’m spending my entire life savings (read: entire student loan for this term) on going out and living it up, I want proof in document form.

This is my bed, complete with the down comforter I brought over here all the way from Maryland/Florida. I LOVE my down comforter, and for a while I was bracing myself for the fact that it’s ridiculously impractical to bring overseas, it’ll take up 50% of my suitcase, and I was just going to have to live without it. Then, I discovered the miracle of space bags, those crazy bags where you can vacuum out the air and make full/queen comforters down to a centimeter thick. Once that happened, there was no way I wasn’t taking it.

Finally, onto the bathroom. Everyone in this flat has their own bathroom, which is pretty amazing for a London flat. The bathroom doors are inside our own rooms- mine’s right on the right when you walk in. As you can see, it’s pretty cozy, and the only thing that really delineates the edge of the shower is the shower curtain that wraps around, so a lot of the bathroom gets wet when I shower, but it’s a pretty nice setup all the same.

There you have it- my fabulous London accommodations! To all my friends back home: You can now proceed to book your tickets to come visit me, because now you see how much floor space you have. I still get the comforter though.

Cheers!

Comments

[Admissions_Daniel]

That is the cleanest kitchen I have ever seen. You all must never cook.

[Mark B.]

Outstanding!

[Michelle Brown]

Bollocks! We cook all the freakin' time! Rhys and I went on a CLEANING BONANZA just to make the kitchen photography worthy. Geez, might as well not have bothered....

:P

[Admissions_Daniel]

LOL. So you are saying that you cleaned and staged your Cribs photos ... what happened to realism. Just check out Ramy's post. No cleaning there. J/K