Twenty-one rooms around one long kitchen, on the corner of Vane and Little Compton, in the Ropewalk.
This is the whole house in cutaway. Pick a floor, open a room, and see its size, its light, what it costs, and who is living in it now. The clay flags are the rooms open this month.
Rent is honest and all-in: bills, wifi, cleaning of the shared rooms, and a share of every communal space. No deposit games.
Your own room, kitchenette, and bath.
For people who want their own door and the house on the other side of it.
A private room off a kitchen shared with three.
For people who like company built into the week, at a price that leaves room to live.
The best light in the building, if it is free.
For the one person who will use the light all day and not waste it.
Twelve to twenty-one people at a time, most staying a year or three. Bakers, a sound engineer, an architect, a ceramicist who has been here the longest. Here is what actually holds it together.
Once a week the whole house eats together if it wants to. Someone cooks, everyone brings something, nobody keeps score.
The only rule in the kitchen: if you are cooking, cook for at least one person past yourself. It is amazing how far that goes.
There is a workshop in the basement and a habit of fixing things. Bikes, chairs, a stubborn record player, all still going.
The house goes quiet at eleven so the early risers and the light sleepers get a fair deal. The roof is the exception in summer.
I have lived in flats where I never learned a neighbour's name. Here I know whose turn it is to buy milk. That is the whole difference.
The house is quiet after eleven, which I need, and loud at Sunday dinner, which I did not know I needed.
I pay less than my old studio flat and I have a workshop, a roof, and eleven people who will feed me. The maths is not close.
Nobody schedules any of this. It just tends to happen in roughly this order, most days, and you can watch the light go with it.
Elin is down before anyone, proofing tomorrow's dough. The kitchen smells like it for hours.
Toast, the good coffee left out, three conversations that were paused last night picking back up.
Whoever works from home drifts to the quiet floor. Two armchairs, a long table, the rule holds.
The pact is simple. If you cook, you cook for one more than yourself. Most nights it is for six.
In summer the roof keys move around the house all evening. A book, the last of the wine, the city going quiet.
The night people find each other at the long table. Tea, not wine, and the day gets talked out.
The Ropewalk is a narrow old street that used to make ship's rope, which is why it runs so straight and so long. It is a five minute walk to almost everything and a slow one, because you will stop to talk.
14 Vane Street, the Ropewalk
At the top of the street, where it is quietest. Everything below is a walk you will not mind making.
Vegetables, a very good cheese stall, and the flowers Mira buys on payday.
The overflow office for half the house. They know our order.
Cold most of the year. The braver residents go anyway, then talk about it all day.
Where the Sunday-dinner leftovers become a picnic if the weather turns.
Gets you home from anywhere. You will not be the only one from the house on it.
Leave your name and we will ask you round to a Sunday dinner. No application fee, no credit theatre. You will meet the house, the house will meet you, and everyone decides from there.