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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
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By Ed Hammond
‘Home ownership provides us with the means to lease somewhere we could never afford to buy’
©Laura Barisonzi
Ed Hammond and his girlfriend Tamzin Baker (formerly of House & Home) near their home in Brooklyn, New York
Four months ago I reached the end of my wits with the New York rental market. After 27 apartment viewings, three boroughs and a trans-Siberian helping of subway rides, I was ready to give up. I had seen everything there was to see. Most were too small, too expensive or too dark. Some were up too many flights of stairs; others too high-tech. One had a fridge that tweeted. None of it was right. Even my realtor, frayed by my fastidiousness, seemed eager to pack it in.
Then I, or rather my girlfriend and the realtor, found somewhere. Tucked on the western shoreline of Brooklyn, where the borough swells out as if to kiss Manhattan for a final time before the Hudson river widens its interminable path seaward, we landed the perfect apartment. The rooms are huge and almost impossibly grand, with herringbone floors and gently vaulted ceilings of creamy white. Narnia-proportioned cupboards and a cavernous hallway add to the stately glow. Even the radiators are ornate. Bowed hulks of waist-high iron that pant a soothing chorus, broken now and then by the baritone warning of a ship nosing out to the Atlantic.
More
IN House & Home
Three weeks ago, the designer Ben Pentreath used these pages to make the case for renting. My colleague Lucy Kellaway retorted last week in defence of ownership. Her prose was sumptuous, his economic argument neat. But habitation is not a binary question. There is a middle way. In being a buy-to-let landlord, I have the bedrock of home ownership and the freedom and means to rent somewhere nicer.
©Laura Barisonzi
The living room of the couple’s rental apartment
Buy-to-let happened to me by accident. After six years of living variously at university, with my mother, briefly elsewhere and then with my mother again, I had saved enough to buy. Like Kellaway, I believe owning is where it is at. Forget the financial side of it: owning gives you a sense of security – and smugness if the market rises – that renting doesn’t begin to address. That alone is worth the outlay.
Like her, I bought my starter-home in an unsavoury north London locale. At £250,000, almost exactly ten times what Kellaway paid 30 years earlier, it was cheap. And it was a wreck. The nine months I spent doing it up with my father were some of the most enjoyable I’ve known.
By Ed Hammond
‘Home ownership provides us with the means to lease somewhere we could never afford to buy’
Ed Hammond and his girlfriend Tamzin Baker (formerly of House & Home) near their home in Brooklyn, New York
Four months ago I reached the end of my wits with the New York rental market. After 27 apartment viewings, three boroughs and a trans-Siberian helping of subway rides, I was ready to give up. I had seen everything there was to see. Most were too small, too expensive or too dark. Some were up too many flights of stairs; others too high-tech. One had a fridge that tweeted. None of it was right. Even my realtor, frayed by my fastidiousness, seemed eager to pack it in.
Then I, or rather my girlfriend and the realtor, found somewhere. Tucked on the western shoreline of Brooklyn, where the borough swells out as if to kiss Manhattan for a final time before the Hudson river widens its interminable path seaward, we landed the perfect apartment. The rooms are huge and almost impossibly grand, with herringbone floors and gently vaulted ceilings of creamy white. Narnia-proportioned cupboards and a cavernous hallway add to the stately glow. Even the radiators are ornate. Bowed hulks of waist-high iron that pant a soothing chorus, broken now and then by the baritone warning of a ship nosing out to the Atlantic.
More
IN House & Home
- Germaine Greer – queen of the jungle
- Design Classic – the Wiggle side chair
- Floating home designs that rock the boat
- Oban – a world away from London
Three weeks ago, the designer Ben Pentreath used these pages to make the case for renting. My colleague Lucy Kellaway retorted last week in defence of ownership. Her prose was sumptuous, his economic argument neat. But habitation is not a binary question. There is a middle way. In being a buy-to-let landlord, I have the bedrock of home ownership and the freedom and means to rent somewhere nicer.
The living room of the couple’s rental apartment
Buy-to-let happened to me by accident. After six years of living variously at university, with my mother, briefly elsewhere and then with my mother again, I had saved enough to buy. Like Kellaway, I believe owning is where it is at. Forget the financial side of it: owning gives you a sense of security – and smugness if the market rises – that renting doesn’t begin to address. That alone is worth the outlay.
Like her, I bought my starter-home in an unsavoury north London locale. At £250,000, almost exactly ten times what Kellaway paid 30 years earlier, it was cheap. And it was a wreck. The nine months I spent doing it up with my father were some of the most enjoyable I’ve known.
