LOOKING for a new place? Can’t afford blissful isolation? Then you’ll be recoiling in horror at what other people call home:
The animal house
What could be better than living alongside cats, dogs, rabbits and whatever squats malevolently in that vivarium? Yes, you’ll be constantly covered in hair, spend hundreds on takeaways rather than prepare food in that kitchen and worst of all will get used to the smell, but that’s all part of the fun.
The hippy house
Welcome to nirvana: there are guitars on the walls, buddhas everywhere and a general house ethos of ‘do whatever housework you’re comfortable with, man’. The wind chimes may well drive you insane before the condescending lecture about how you need to relax. Namaste.
The weirdly Ikea house
Let he who is without wonky flatpack furniture cast the first stone, sure, but this place is just unsettling. You’re either in the home of a tightwad with no imagination, or you’ve bumped your head in a branch of Ikea and gone into some sort of site-specific coma.
The mouldy basement flat
Not sure if subterranean living is for you? As you’re long as you’re not overly worried about damp, don’t mind respiratory problems and treat black mould on every wall as back-to-nature home decor, you’ll love it here.
The stoner house
What’s that smell? Nope, not the four sticks of incense burning simultaneously, the fragrance it’s supposed to be masking – ah, weed. Welcome back to a world you last lived in at university and had not missed.
The something-went-down-here house
The decor’s nice, it’s bright and there’s even a garden, but there’s a nagging sense of something very, very wrong. Did they have an argument just before you arrived? What happened to the previous occupant? Did someone get murdered here? Run.
