City living! It comes with its pros and cons. For example: a pro is that you live in the hustling, bustling city, and when you post photos, old classmates who still live in your hometown think, “Ooh, so sophisticated,” if they still follow you or remember you at all. And a con is that you may find yourself paying an exorbitant amount of money to live in a grimy studio with no amenities and a shower in the middle of your kitchen.
If you think about it, $1750 a month for such a unique living opportunity is actually a steal. Where else could you hop in the shower and pull an ice cold beer out of the fridge with your right hand while your left knee experiences a scalding hot dribble of water? How else could you get clean while keeping one eye on a bubbling pot of pasta water? And anyway, how many apartments come with what is basically a built in removable wallpaper holder in the middle of the kitchen? Usually kitchens are drab and...er… they’re just very drab, but hang a funky shower curtain on that bad boy and presto change-o, floor to most of the way up the ceiling color. Landlord approved!
Theoretically, such unexpected shower placement also feels like it might bear cool, flirty fruit when you have guests over. For example, imagine a scenario where you and a sexy friend are baking something messy, like brownies, and the brownie batter gets all over your friend, and you say “Oh, just hop in the shower” and they basically have no choice but to strip down in front of you to enter said shower because there’s no privacy at all and that’s not your fault! Alternatively, scrub the tub with bleach, fill it with water and epsom salts, and soak while calling out different impressions of Food Network stars your partner should act out while cooking you dinner. Like having a TV in your bathroom, which is fancy! But you’re naked in the kitchen and it’s worse.
Williamsburg not for you? Perhaps you’d prefer something in lower Manhattan. This Mott Street studio takes a more classic approach with a clawfoot tub. Though it’s really more of a remixed classic thanks to its proximity to the stove. With a shape like a beheaded version of what medieval manuscript illuminators thought elephants looked like, this tub is perfect for sitting in with your knees really close to your chest. If you rent this apartment, you will feel like Michelle Pfeiffer. Specifically Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1988 film Married to the Mob, which features the same bathtub-kitchen layout.
Of course, don’t feel like you have to confine your options to just New York. How about Vancouver? If you’ve ever expressed the feeling that you “practically live in your bathroom,” now you can! In this “micro studio” which may or may not just be someone’s bathroom with a bed stuck in a corner. The shower’s newly renovated with luxe marble accents that will encompass the entirety of your sweet pad friends and family ever see shared online. And if you bring a date home, you’ll surely gain points for your place’s minimal carbon footprint.
So you don’t have a yard, or a picket fence, or a tree in eye’s distance, or a washer dryer, or even a self-contained bathroom with a door for privacy and more than 600 square feet to your name. But you do have your fun, sexy, flirty, city life! And as you sit on your bed downing cold takeout noodles and looking up train schedules to get out to the Hamptons, that’s really all that matters.
—Ali Oshinsky
Photo via ITG
