Derelicte

onefinestay is a company that acts as a go-between linking holidaymakers with one of a kind accommodation – peoples’ homes.

They find the most elegant, interesting and upmarket homes in London (in zones 1-2) and provide a service that facilitates the householder to transform their home into vacation rental when they’re away. It is a chance for homeowners to earn extra cash and tourists to have an authentic and local experience.

onefinestay is in effect, a hotel service, providing a concierge, cleaning, soaps, towels and linen for each home. I interviewed someone from their team to discuss the company and find out in depth what they offer.

The idea behind onefinestay is clever and unique by following the model of a hotel but the principles of local and personal tourism such as Couchsurfing and airbnb. It is a promising business model.  They have a found a formal exclusivity overlooked by airbnb, but also discount the need for host and guest interaction.

I like their small touches such as tamper tape on drawers to prevent (or perhaps encourage) noisiness and the welcome pack that has a letter and house rules. Each guest is greeted by someone from onefinestay and shown around.

They have paid a lot of attention to detail by making postcards of each house and even taking the archetypal ‘do not disturb’ sign and turning it into marketing flyer to advertise their company.

I am interested in whether the concepts behind onefinestay can be adapted for more affordable and shabbier homes and if we can do this ourselves.  How can we prepare our homes for a stranger coming and make this acceptable to everyone? I want to adapt the home to become a temporary public space by providing a service that delivers the means to transform it into a temporary hotel. Im sure are many ways we can ‘dress’ our homes up and secret ways to make our houses to look swankier than they are. 

From exploring idea of tours and guides I am intrigued in how we navigate our way around spaces, particularly in homes and hotels. I am interested in how they are structured and designed for our movement, why and where furniture is placed and what we portray about ourselves through furnishings and decoration.

The disparity between hotels is immense, which is why there are different set standards determined by a star rating. Researching on Airbnb, you can compare the prices of different accommodation, and see that there is effectively an invisible star rating dependent on what the host offers (pool or rooftop views perhaps) their location and furnishings.

I want to know where the line is drawn between home and hotel because of the plethora of home networking sites. It seems that many people are willing to open up their homes to strangers. So can we prepare our houses for stranger staying? There are issues of trust, sanitation and privacy to consider. I spoke to a friend’s mother who said she would never have anyone to stay she didn’t know in her house because of,

“Security, obviously you’ve got all your possessions, money and valuable things left around and also you don’t know what their personal habits are, they might not fit in with yours and if they’re going to use your kitchen. Are they clean are they tidy? And using all your facilities I just don’t think it’s a very good idea. And you don’t know what sort of personal sanity they’ve got, they might do some sort of wacky things in the night or something….”

When it comes to opening up their homes I think some people follow quite a ridged hotel business model to give themselves distance from a guest, where as there are plenty of people who are less unconcerned about the condition their house and who stays. 

To gain a little more insight I went to look at two very opposing hotels. The first was the Premier Inn, which was as expected, highly standardised with no variety between the rooms and minimal furnishings. Everything is colour coded in their signature white and purple, and the furniture is basic and unadorned. The overall style is no-frills, disinfected; and supplies your basic needs: bed, bathroom, and generously, tea-making facilities.

I undertook a transformation for the second hotel visit from poor student to wealthy, engaged woman. I was given a tour by the hotel’s concierge in a renowned 5 star hotel in Central London of two suites each starting at £1500 a night. Both consisted of a living room, bedroom, walk in wardrobe and bathroom. Each had its own style and signature decoration and some of the furniture was especially created for the rooms. There were fresh white towels, bathrobes, magazines artfully placed on the coffee table (Vogue etc.), soaps, two T.Vs, flowers and butler service. Marbled floored bathrooms, thickly carpeted bedrooms, and carefully chosen paint for the walls with old-fashioned touches such as skirting boards, borders and crown molding. The overall feel was, grandeur, elegance and comfort nonetheless at an inflated cost.

Thus, with a growing culture of home networking or as I will name it ‘Domestic Tourism’ how can the model of a hotel inspire us to adapt our homes for temporariness? I would like to design subtle and economical alterations to modify our homes for someone staying. A lot of what hotels provide is a carefully planned and branded experience, so I want capture this with a third party facilitator to these existing sites. 

Continuing my research into guides, I booked myself onto the Jack the Ripper tour around East London. Positive reviews on trip adviser encouraged my spur of the moment decision. I didn’t take into consideration the temperature that evening: -2 degrees. Even my 6 layers and 3 pairs of socks didn’t let me forget about it. The tour itself was fascinating. I didn’t appreciate the outing’s popularity till we saw all the competing tour operators performing in the same spots with groups huddled around them. The rivalry seemed a serious matter, spurring on enemy spectators to slyly whisper “our tour’s better than yours” as they passed us. In Mitre Square known disturbingly as, ’Ripper Corner’ there were at least 5 other groups. I expected some kind of dance off between us at any minute. 

One aspect I believe that led our tour to be superior was the guide’s ‘Ripper vision’, aka a mini projector. He had put the time in to edit the Victorian building facades onto photos of the existing buildings today, and also projected photos of the murdered women. Till I saw the pictures, I had forgotten how horrific the killings were. It made me question everyone’s morbid fascination with them, as well as reminding me of the tuna salad I’d eaten earlier, which unexpectedly made me quite nauseous. I do think the projector brought the tour alive, but the guide was also talented at recounting the stories and describing the Victorian east end. It was ‘the poor, the very poor or the homeless’ surviving on the lowest standards of living at that time. I will definitely never be able to see east London in the same way again. 

The highlight may have been when we were stood outside a former women’s doss house, which is now part of London School of Economics. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a bored student watching us out the window, and as the guide was in mid-flow, the student had some sort of inspirational brainwave and began to re-enact a murder scene by pretending to earnestly stab one of his fellow peers. All in good taste.