F4A #1: Rental Health
Shelves in London, couches in Berlin, and somebody's new favourite cupboard
Two bamboo side tables with smoked glass plates that I nabbed for under 40€
At around 9:28 a.m. on April 15, 2021, I entered debt. It was an unceremonious proceeding: I’d just finished showering, wrapped a towel around my waist, and as I let a face wash set, I absentmindedly checked my phone. I saw that Berlin’s rent cap had been ruled unconstitutional. Known as the Mietendeckel, it had offered a strict, exhaustive rent control policy for around 1.5 million flats in a city of 3.6 million: Accounting for factors like the most recent renovations and the date of construction, it tendered a maximum rental price for qualifying apartments across the city. For around five months, millions of people lived a life less encumbered by rent – myself including. As the ruling was announced, we were told we were now liable to backpay any money we’d saved – in full, as soon as possible. The sums were staggering: Some owed hundreds of Euros, while others owed thousands.
Like many laws, there’d been loopholes long before the court’s ruling was announced. Furnished flats, for example, were exempt from the rent cap, leading to a thin scum of opportunists loaning out furniture to letting companies, thereby circumnavigating the legislative purview. Across Germany, furnished flats are both a symptom and a driver of the affordable housing crisis: The Mietpreißbremse – a nationwide rent cap that is enforced through the court system at the renter’s behest, and without significant punitive measures for offending rental companies – promised to regulate prices. But similar loopholes still apply: According to a recent report, the proportion of flats on the German market that were offered with furniture went from 8.3% to 18.3% between 2014 and 2021 (the Mietpreißbremse took effect in 2015).
I find this one of the acute peculiarities of renting in today’s climate. When I spoke to young people whose living arrangements changed suddenly during the early seasons of the pandemic, they told me that they’d wanted more agency, more freedom, and more opportunities to develop a sense of place within the walls of their homes and the terms of their leases. Here, furnished flats are especially egregious: These contracts deputize renters as the guardian and caretaker for soggy coffee tables, sulking bed frames, lifeless couches, and MDF bookshelves – at a premium price, too, especially when a kitchen table collapses under the heft of a coffee cup or, like, three A4 letters.
Here’s what sickens me: I am often worried by exactly how few of my friends have never experienced a housing shortage – in Berlin, where the rental climate is famously unforgiving, but also in the U.K., back in the States, in Australia, and in the many satellite locations to which my social circles have dispersed. It’s a skewed sample (my friends and I are drawn to cities, though the pandemic has push some to calmer pastures), but it’s striking nonetheless. What I’ve noticed is that this scarcity engenders a disordered relationship with our living spaces: How do we care for our homes when they are not are own, and why should we care about them? When the few opportunities to make space for ourselves are increasingly locked off, what can we do with what remains?
I like to think of Furniture For All as an inroad to redressing this relationship. Yes, what I find is maybe a bit too bulky for many rentals, and no, I don’t expect compensation or a finder’s fee – what I aim to offer instead is an opportunity to engage with the spaces we live in, and to wonder what they could be with a little work, or time, or just the opportunity to think of them as our own, if only for now.
When I first started finding furniture, it was a way to lay down my roots: “I search for furniture because I’ve made a choice to stay and that choice was my own,” I wrote in the salad days of what would later become Furniture For All. “I search for furniture because I do not know what I want until I know what I can have”.
If you don’t know what you want (or what you can have), I get it. Here are a few pieces to get started.
This is a newsletter exclusive – you heard it here first! This two-meter-wide shelving unit has it all. There are head-turning drawer pulls by Victor Wilkins for G Plan, and an immaculate wood grain. If you look closely from left to right, you can see how the grid system that undergirds the height of each shelf and the width of each door is regular, but not necessarily copy-and-paste. Is it massive? Sure, but it’s £200 and still listed in Kilburn.
I’m not the biggest fan of second-hand sofas – upholstery is bitter and unapologetic when it comes to stains, scents, and visible signs of wear. This couch by Wilhelm Knoll is a beaut, though: There’s a gorgeous heathering on the cushions, and the curved cherry frame is really stately and impressive. Clock the exposed structure in the shots from behind, and pick it up for 390€ in Berlin-Mitte if you’re interested.
I’m not a DJ, but I do take requests: I’m always happy to help find furniture, so let me know what you’re looking for. Reply to this email or send me a message on Twitter what you want, where you are (generally! don’t send me your address – I don’t want it!), and what price point fits your budget, and I’ll see what I can do.
Another newsletter exclusive – for months, I’ve been begging my friends to buy this 70s daybed. At 80€, it’s hardly even an ask! There’s so much to love here: The pristine fabric, the sliding cushions on the back, and – if you’ll indulge me – the history of this piece as well: The labels on the back indicate it’s from VEB Mibella Böhlitz-Ehrenberg, an East German furniture designer who worked out of Leipzig in Saxony. Take a look at their studio in this archive photo, and pick it up in Berlin-Wedding.
Hear me out: This cupboard is my favourite kind of furniture to find. It clocks in at 9-feet-tall, all balanced on a footprint that looks to be the size of an office coffee machine. While it’s formally neat and simple, the few decorative elements it has all point towards a Gothic design – which would make sense with a darker wood like mahogany, but the warm pine would it feel almost childlike, and definitely less imposing than you’d expect. It’s still available for £240 in Ealing, but I wonder for how long: It’s not something for everyone, but I know it’ll be everything for someone.