Twelve years ago, the singer-songwriter Polly Paulusma - who has supported Bob Dylan, Coldplay and Jamie Cullum - viewed a three-bedroom house, fell in love with it, and bought it. She was gleefully happy - everybody else thought she was mad. For the house, on St John's Hill, in south London, was less than half the width of the average British home, at only 7ft 7in.
The three-storey house, a 10-minute walk west of Clapham Junction station, is sandwiched between its neighbours like a thin slice of ham between two generous slices of bread. Yet, although it is the size of a large corridor, the property isn't nearly as odd as you might expect.
"From the outside, you can't possibly imagine how human beings can live here," says Paulusma, who shares the 806 sq ft space with her 6ft 1in Canadian husband, Mick, a film-maker, and their children, Valentine, 2, and Coren, 1. "But it feels much bigger from the inside. When you get in, it just makes sense. I think it has great beauty, and people either get that or not."
During my visit, curious passers-by regularly peer through the window beside the front door, marvelling at the bonsai-proportioned home. Does that happen a lot? "All the time," Paulusma says, smiling.
The tiny terrace is now up for sale with Foxtons for £450,000. Louis Harding, branch manager at the estate agency's Battersea office, says it is the quirkiest home he's come across in 5½ years valuing properties in the area.
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It has the layout of a traditional home, albeit concertinaed. The front door opens onto a dining area, which has a custom-made table, 2ft 7in wide (conventional tables are much too broad). A few steps later, you're in the living area, with its two sofa chairs. "You could have a conventional sofa," says Paulusma, who is a petite 5ft 4in, "but it would take up half the house." After a few more steps - a couple of strides if you're Mick - you're in the kitchen, with double doors leading out to a 50ft garden.
"If you just went on the floorplan, you might think it was a bit odd, but the fact that the family has lived there happily all this time shows you that the space works," Harding says. "Reactions at viewings have been mixed. Some people see its skinniness as a negative, but others see that it's on at the same price as a two-bedroom flat, and for that you get a garden, an extra bedroom and your own house."
Potential buyers be warned, though: there is very little storage space. It helps to be creative, exceptionally tidy or resolutely minimalist. Some of the nifty solutions the couple have come up with over the years include a home-made wardrobe in which the clothes hang facing you, rather than to the side; a bespoke wall-mounted cupboard in the kitchen, for all the things you might normally leave lying around (batteries, phone chargers, Sellotape); and storage containers underneath the dining-room chairs.
"Crazy storage ideas have come out of a gentle compromise between Mick's tidiness and my tendency towards clutter," Paulusma explains. She points to two home-made seating cubes on wheels in the living room, which conceal a printer, a drinks cabinet and a record player with LPs from their teenage years. The pièce de résistance, though, is a magnificent wall-mounted ironing board in the bedroom that stows away as if you are on a boat.
A shed at the bottom of the garden houses the recording studio where Paulusma recorded her two albums. Indeed, in researching the history of the house, she discovered that the property had a previous musical connection: in the early 20th century, it was a banjo-making workshop, and before that a tobacconist and sweet shop. Installing a gas fire in the living room, she found ivy suckers on the brickwork, suggesting that the wall may once have been an external one. It is likely that the house stands on the site of a small lane that allowed horses and carts to pass between the buildings on either side.
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Paulusma believes hers is the slenderest home in London - and she may well be right. There is a property on Goldhawk Road, in Shepherd's Bush, west London, that at its narrowest measures a mere 5ft 5in. It bears a blue plaque proclaiming it "the thinnest house in London", even though it measures 9ft 11in at its widest point - more than 2ft wider than Paulusma's home. She has even gone as far as contacting Guinness World Records, but sadly its experts won't confirm how her house ranks in the capital. It only has a category for the thinnest home in the UK, awarded to 50 Stuart Street, in North Ayrshire, which measures only 3ft 11in.
Small homes have been taking some flak lately: a recent survey by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment revealed that Britain's newly built homes are now the most cramped in western Europe, giving rise to the term "rabbit hutch" Britain. Yet Paulusma feels there are unreported benefits to bijou living. She clearly loves her home, in all its peculiar Dickensian glory. "I honestly could not have been happier living here," she says. "People think they need more space than they do. As my mother-in-law - one of life's great optimists - points out, being so small means there is less to clean. You don't need masses of space; it's a burden, and you end up having to vacuum more. There's never been a day when I thought, 'God, I wish we had an extra 2ft.'
Foxtons; 020 7801 1111, foxtons.co.uk
Love me slender
A home that, at its narrowest, is only 5ft 5in wide was put on sale for £525,000 last year. The 1,034 sq ft terrace is squeezed between a massage parlour and a fabric shop on the Goldhawk Road, west London. A more recent example is 29A Lansdowne Crescent, in Notting Hill. Built by its architect owner, Jeremy Lever, it measures 12ft 3in at its narrowest.
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STRAIGHT AND NARROW
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