The following is an absolutely true 100% accurate transcript of a recent conversation with one of our sales team from a gentleman from Yorkshire:

us: Good morning. How can we help you?
yorkshire: I am searching for a large loft:
us: excellent. have you just started looking or have you been searching for a while?
yorkshire: bloody ages. All the lofts I am seeing are crap and fall apart as soon as you lay a finger on them
us: OK. Where have you been searching so far
yorkshire: all over the sodding country. Everyone I speak to pretend to build solid lofts but they are all a bunch of liars. I saw a couple of lofts in Hull recently but they were crap I tell you - crap crap crap. I would not have put a rabid dog in any of them let alone my prize possessions.
us: so you are want to buy a loft for someone in your family.
yorkshire: the’re the only family i have. They always come home without fail and I am dead proud of them
us: If you ahve been looking at lofts all over the country, why do you want to try looking in London? Are they moving to London?
yorkshire: They will go where ever I tell them to go you know, but they always come back as I said.
us: what kind of loft are you looking for?
yorkshire: don’t need to be nowt posh ya know - but i needs to be as large a possible that they can find easily and get in and out of quick
us: how much are you looking to spend?
yorkshire: i dunno really. would 400 get me somit good - one of those designer type lofts - you know - the ones in the magazines. I would luv to stick it to George from The Plough (a pub, we assumed!). He has a bloody rotten loft, leaks everwhere and smells really bad. He never cleans it - a bit like himself (huge hearty laughing goes on for a minute or so.
us: I can assure that what ever we may have to show you, they certainly won’t smell - but perhaps of freshly made bread.
yorkshire: So that’s your trick for getting me to part with more of me hard earned readies. (loud chuckle again)
us: well we have a couple we could show you. When do you plan to be in London and will you be bringing the member of your family who you want to buy it for?
yorkshire: what do you mean? They don’t need to sodding see it. They are not going to be there that much. I am entering them for competitions all over the place all the time. No time to get too comfortable. They will just ‘av wot I give ‘em. Wot a daft question sonny! No wonder you southerners all drive round in those german cars. You ask daft questions and charge twice the price of the rest of the country. Anyway, back to business. Can you send me some pictures of wot you got sonny. I am not going to come all the way down ‘t’ smoke for not-in.
us: Everything we have is shown on our website. Pictures, Floor plans, location maps, HIP reports etc.
yorkshire: Now you are really pissing me off laddie! What the ***k to you mean - Floor Plans’. Do you put ******g kitchens & bog in ‘em or somit? I just need a loft - not a bloody hotel!
us: I think I must have mis-understood you. Apologies. Have you looked at our website yet?
yorkshire: No, not yet. I just chucked in ‘lofts’ into google and up came your name and number to I called you - in the old fashion way - by telephone. I don’t believe in all this email bollocks - i like to hear the man I am speaking to. You learn alot about who you speak to just by the way their voice is - difficult with you though coz all southerners sound the same you know - different bloody language up ‘ere. Anyways, I am at me son’s house. He’s got the computer so let me take a look at your website. Give us a few minutes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..(about 10 minutes later)

yorkshire: You laddie are ‘avin a ******g laff! I don’t want one of those soft southern bastard posh loft properties you daft git. I WANT A PIGEON LOFT - A LOFT FOR PIGEONS!!

Do you sell those? I might as well be phoning ******g Afghanistan. A  P I G E O N   L O F T. You know, those flying ******s that s**t on your head when you look up. Ya daft beggar. I should have reversed the charges!

us: We sell many very unusual and unique properties, but I am afraid that this time, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Probably best I do not add you to our mailing list for new lofts - unless of course you have £400,000 available.

yorkshire: I don’t know who is the bigger chump but it’s been a laff laddie. Bye - bye.

Pigeon Racing Tips"Custom" Loft - Not sure Manhattan Loft quality!

"Custon Loft" - not quite to Manhattan Loft standards!

The Traditional Loft

With the face of schools changing so rapidly nowadays - with massive modern monoliths and the characterless and souless environments of many of the modern schools, it has been a refreshing blast back to the past seeing some of the Victorian School conversions come onto the market recently.

The fashion all really started about 15 years ago when Sapcote, a small commercial development company, stumbled across a couple of old Victorian School buildings on Amies Street in Battersea. At the time, the school itself had been vacant for many, many years and was starting to crumble away. The local council was selling the site and the only other interested party at the time were Barratt Homes! Their visionary idea was to potentially knock down these two magnificent building and build a bunch of homogonised modern terraces and try to blend in with the Victorian Terraces surrounding the site on all four sides. Thank god that never happened.

When Sapcote acquired the site (now called The Village), they were really not sure which way to go with it. Having been involed in Commercial developments, they initally throught that creating large Studio style offices would be possible, but this was also at the time that the loft market had really start to become established in London, but almost exclusively over in the East of London and Docklands.

So having got agreement with the local planning department, they offered the entire site, broken down into large ’shell spaces’ with Residential or Live/Work use. For this part of London, it was a completely radical idea and in fairness, the uptake was extremely slow for the first 8/12 months with a couple of brave photographers stepping into the breach and buying a couple of the shell spaces to create live/work studios.

It was not until (Viscount) David Linley decided to buy the entire top floor of one of the buildings that the development really took off and within a few months of Linley buying, the entire development was sold out. The smallest units were around 1,200sq ft, with many at between 1800 - 2,500sq ft and several at 3,500 - 4,000sq ft +.

Shells were relatively normal in East London and the furthest west that shell spaces had gone was previous Kings Cross at York Central. But old Victorian schools were absolutely ideal for creating massive loft apartments. At the time Sapcote missed a trick in so much as they sold vast open spaces at about £100 per sq ft, but many of the buyers then created anything up to a further 50% in floor area with mezzanine levels, for relatively small cost. They certainly did not make this mistake again when the bought another old school site on Burns Road, just off Battersea Park Road. Before they released those spaces, they installed Mezzanine levels into most of the shells and divided up each floor into smaller units.

Prior to the Village, there had been one other school conversion in Battersea called The Lanterns which was 2 buildings, but just broken up into huge Loft style houses. After these 1st three conversions, the fashion for covnerted Victorian Schools spread like wild fire to 4 or 5 other buildings in Battersea and then across most parts of London. But these first few conversions provided what are still, some of London’s most spectacular Loft apartments - vast spaces with huge volume and incredible light. Sadly, the more that developers jumped on the band wagon, the smaller and smaller and more bland the conversions became.

One interest aspect about these kinds of properties that unlike conventional flats, were the smaller they are, the bigger the £’s per sq ft, in the last few years, people have realised the true rarity of the availabilty of the exceptionally large open-plan living spaces that these lofts provide that the larger they are, the more expensive they are in £’s per sq ft. About 3 years ago, we sold two lofts in The Village, located next to each other, to one buyer, who has consequently knocked them through to create an apartment in the region of 6,000+ sq ft. There cannot be many apartments in the whole of London with a 6,000sq ft floor plate!

We have just agreed the sale of one of the larger lofts in The Village which was on the market for £3.25m. It was previously owned by a well known photographer for about 10+ years but the next owners created a fabulous home, shipping in materials from Italy and all over Europe. We have just been instructed on a very striking top floor loft, again in the Village for £1.2m and will also have a couple of very individual lofts in The Old Chesterton Building on Battersea Park Road coming up at £580,000 and £825,000.

As the need for more modern schools keeps on growing then we are sure that many more of these wonderful buildings will come to the Residential market. We just hope that the developers avoid breaking them up into rabbit hutches and respect the very nature of the open-plan and large lateral spaces that these buildings can provide for more individual homes.

 

These apartments can provide the very best of Loft living and continue to find new fans every year. They may not be ideal for large families or for those that cannot get their heads around the concept of open plan living, but they continue to evolve and keep on providing buyers with highly original and striking homes.

 

Simon Harris, our managing director, has been responsible for selling properties in every single London Borough and most postcodes, selling a loft apartment in 1994 in Peckham for £85,000 to an astonishing contemporary house in Central London for £23.5m. “When I started marketing these kinds of properties in 1994, I called the company ‘Cityscope’ in line with what at the time, was a very urban market - rather scraggy factory conversions in East London, a few rather basic artist studios on Gunter Grove near Fulham and some converted stables in Mortlake”.

LIMEHOUSE CUT in POPLAR

David Chipperfield designed penthouse

But immediately, we are urgently needing more interesting properties in all areas of London - at all price levels - for a daily growing band (nearly an army) of buyers. We would be delighted to discuss any aspect of your property plans and of course, a no obligation valuation.

Authentic Loft space in Bermondsey

New to Market. Penthouse overlooking Islington Green

It is always a dangerous exercise trying to portray market conditions, especially in the current climate. So many opinions, based on so many varied predictions, results, bank rates, media articles etc, without many of them , if any, proving to be reliable. From where we sit, we can only relay the information we see every day with our enquiries from potential buyers and how those enquiries are moving onto a successful sale - and at what price.
Since the beginning of May 2009, there has been a very significant rise of new enquiries - at all price levels. In comparison to March and April 2009, May enquiries are up by 300% and compared to May 2008, they are double.

£1.6m Loft in Kings Cross, sold in May 2009

There is a general feeling from these new enquiries that people feel in many cases, prices have probably gone as low as they are likely to go - from those willing to sell and whilst there still be some downward movement in some areas of the UK, well located, interesting, quality properties are bottomed out.
This may or may not be the case and we are certainly not going to attempt to predict anything, but all we know is that we agreed sales on 13 properties during May 2009 (we agreed sales on 8 properties in May 2008 and 17 in May 2007) but only 6 in March 2009 and 8 in April 2009.
In some cases, we even had to go to sealed bids, but only on the basis of being in receipt of several offers and in those cases, below the asking prices. There were several properties that had been on the market for 4-5 months, a few of which had been reduced in price during that time and interested parties revisiting them several months after initial viewing the property - and finally making an offer.

£895k converted Tram building in N7 - sold in May 2009

This activity has also been partly driven by a severe lack of new properties coming to the market - again at all price levels. Add the revitalised demand the the real lack of new (interesting) housing stock and whilst we are by no means back to any kind of a rising market, supply and demand are not even remotely closely related and the appearence is that of a bullish market. In this case, the bulls are the buyers (we have several cases that can only be described as mild stalking - from several buyers calling our Valuer, Simon, 2-3 times a day to ask about forthcoming valuations and potential offerings!).
In fairness, it is an excellent time to buy as well as sell. If the seller is realistic about the potential sale price, then without any shadow of a doubt, a sale can be arranged relatively quickly or at the very least, enquiries and viewings are hugely up on 3 months ago. As an example, we posted the details of an interesting Live/Work duplex loft in E2 at £330,000 yesterday, and within 24 hours, we received 9 email enquiries - and we have not even had a chance to email the details out to our registered buyers. At the same time, we emailed 16 existing registered buyers with pre-view details of a Penthouse coming on the market in Islington at £1.625m and received 10 replies of interest to view the property as soon as possible. Of course, these enquiries may not result in any sale, but it confirms the renewed level of interest shown over the last 6+ weeks.

E2 Duplex Live/Work Loft just on market for £330k

Lending and reasonable mortgages are still a huge problem for many and we know of many 100’s of potential buyers who would dearly love to buy something now but are still finding it extremely difficult to source reasonable lending.

The result of this increased activity can only be endorsed by the fact that several of our staff have changed their holiday plans for this summer - one of them changing their cycling holiday in the Lake District to 10 days in Vancouver and another from a holiday cottage in Lille to 2 weeks in Corsica! A reliable endorsement of a stonger market? Perhaps not, but increased holiday plans from colleagues who can only be described as wall flowers when it comes to buying their round at our end of weekly get together, then perhaps the signs are encouraging.

Corsica - Bonifacio

False Creek, Vancouver

From time to time, we are going to relay some of the experiences that we all go through here. Being specialists in such an interesting part of the property industry, we come across some remarkable and off the wall properties as well as owners and buyers.

One of the best aspects of what we do here at Unique is the hugely varied experiences we encounter on a daily basis.

A day in the life of our valuer, Simon Harris can include (as of a day last week) seeing a nearly completed converted Nuclear Bunker in North London, a Loft in Chiswick, an Artist Studio House in Holland Park, a Penthouse in Islington and a river-front warehouse conversion in Limehouse.

So look out for these ‘diary stories’. An insight outside of conventional Estate Agency that is rarely seen.

Camden Loft - coming soon

It is the great American Dream to own a single-family house. The house on its own defined piece of land servces as moated castle, the place with withdraw fom the world. And house ownership is the emblem of success, proof of having made it. For most Americans, the requisite house is located in the suburbs, and for most, its look is predictable. Despite the stated ideal of individuality, the true desire of most people is confirmity: in the east, the coveted house, tiny or large, is likely to be Colonial: and in the west, California ranch.

But in a small percentage of cases, the house becomes a vehicle of personal expression for both the clients and the architect. For the clients, the drive to create and possess a house truly of their own is both Eros and Thanatos: to craft a nest were one can live and live out one’s life, both stimulated and sheltered by trhe houses’s embrace. For the architect, the house is both talisman and testing ground.

The house as design laboratory for the architect is not only a truism, it’s a fact. Despite changes in family structure, leisure time, and household technology, the basic diagram remains essentially unaltered in two hundred years of American architectural history. Because the program is so thoroughly known, architects are free to give full range to their creativity. The nearly sacred simplicity of the house also makes it the last building type for which an architect can sometimes exercise almost complete design control, free of the often permicious influence of developers, cost managers, hydra-hdeaded client committees and government bureaucrats.
The house, then, is the repository and fulfillment of dreams and fantasies on both sides - architect and client. its cultural importance in America cannot be overstated: in a nation that emphasises choice and individual expression, prizes originality and exhibits an intense interest in psychoanalysis, the house is the final apotheosis of personality.
At the same time, many architects have concluded that individual expression in architecture must be merged with collective cultural myths and memories. Antoine Predock, for example, goes well beyond pragmatic responses to the environment to incorporate spiritually satisfying myths about the special qualities of the land. He designs buildings that responds physically to the environment of the American Southwest and aesthetically to the need for spiritual ties to the earth: the White Residence reminds us of a simple abode structure but is far more sophisticated.

Concord House

Machado and Silvetti, in their Concord House, assemble a number of room types, that, while abstracted, remind us of the traditional architecture. The overall composition manages not only to recount the architectural history of the semi-rural site, but to create a psychological portrait of their knowledgeable clients and their extensvie architectural experiences.

Steven Holl, both in the Berkowitz-Odgis Hosue and the Makuhari Housing, finds literary constructs that he weaves into the expression of his buildings.

And in California, the firms of RoTo and Morphosis base their designs on highly cerebral themes, among them the myth of mathematical perfection. Whilst these architects in no way preresent a common school of architecture, their work betrays a series of shared preoccupations that are fundamentally “modern” if not “modernist”. Dynamism, spatial energy, complexity in plan and instability are teh means by which some, such as Zapata, Roto and Morphosis, express what is signifies to live at the end of the Twentieth Century, into the Twenty First. Other architects, such as W G Clark and Stanley Saitowitz, seek not to reflect comtemporary life but to provide a refuge from it. There is in many of these designs the desire to test limites of gravity, of material and of composition and the urge to create a building that is felt as much as seen. Finally, these architects seek not to solve universal problems but to focus instead on the personal, the idiosyncratic, the particular needs of a given client, the specific possibilities of a given place.

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