Against the Showroom Apartment

Every new building in my city has one. It is usually on the first floor, near the lift, with the door propped open on weekends and a young man in a good shirt waiting inside with a tablet. It is called the show flat, and it is the most dishonest room in Europe.

I have been inside dozens of them, partly out of curiosity and partly because they are warm on a Saturday in January. They are all the same. A pale sofa with three cushions placed at exact intervals. A bowl of lemons that are not lemons. A bookshelf with eleven books, all with their spines turned inward so that nobody can see what they are. A bed made so tightly that sitting on it would feel like vandalism. A kitchen that has never smelled of onions.

The show flat is designed so that nobody could ever have lived in it. That is its whole purpose. It sells the possibility of a life by removing every trace of one. There are no coats on the hook, no post on the table, no drawer full of string and batteries and a key to a door you no longer own. The rooms are photographed, the photographs go online, and thousands of people who are looking for somewhere to live scroll through them in rooms that look nothing like that.

My argument is simple. The show flat has become the standard by which we judge our own homes, and it is a standard designed to make us fail.

Consider what it asks of a room. That it has no history. That it contains no objects that have been used, inherited, broken and mended. That nothing in it was chosen because it was cheap, or because it was a gift, or because it was already there when you moved in. That it looks the same at eleven at night as it does at eleven in the morning. No room in which a person actually lives can meet those conditions. And yet I hear friends apologise for their homes all the time, and when I listen to what they are apologising for, it is always the difference between their room and that one.

Tenants feel this most. A rented flat is already full of other people's decisions: the landlord's paint, the previous tenant's curtains, a sofa nobody chose. The show flat tells them that the goal is to erase all of that and replace it with nothing. It turns the ordinary traces of a shared, borrowed, much-used home into evidence of failure.

I would like to propose the opposite standard. A good room is one that shows its use. It has a chair that has been sat in so often it has taken the shape of a particular back. It has marks on the doorframe where children were measured. It has a shelf of books whose spines face outward, even the embarrassing ones. It has a drawer that does not quite close. It smells, faintly, of the last thing that was cooked in it.

None of this photographs well. That is fine. Rooms are not for photographing. They are for living in, and a room that has been lived in properly will always look, to the eye trained by the show flat, a little untidy.

The young man with the tablet will not agree with me, and I do not blame him. He has flats to sell. But the next time you walk into your own home and feel that small drop of disappointment at the coats on the hook and the post on the table, remember where that feeling was taught to you. It was taught in a room that nobody has ever slept in, by a bowl of lemons that cannot be eaten.