The interior of the house looked exactly like an old run-down ski chalet. It was open-plan and very bohemian and I loved it at first sight.
There was hardly any furniture. The three bedrooms, which were accessed by a spiral staircase, were divided with makeshift stud partitions and offered little privacy. The feeling of living in a ski chalet on top of the Alps was heightened by the lack of central heating. The place was freezing and we were reduced to using electric fan heaters to keep ourselves warm. Needless to say our electricity bills were huge.
Five of us shared this tiny space. There was a couple in one of the rooms, two girls in another and yours truly in a tiny box room. We were all in college and lived the clichéd student life. We went out on the town three or four nights a week and had an after-pub party almost every weekend.
The house was only a stagger from Buck Whaley’s nightclub on Lower Leeson Street, where we often ended up on a night out. Because of the house’s city-centre location we had a steady stream of visitors.
We had two pull-out sofas in the living room that never returned to their full upright position the entire time we lived there. There was always someone crashed out on one of them.
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We cooked on an old stove with four rings. There was no kitchen table or chairs, but there was a breakfast bar-style counter that we stood at to eat. We had one bar stool that we liberated from a nightclub, and although we promised ourselves we would buy another four to facilitate a proper sit-down breakfast, we never all had money at the one time to go shopping.
There was hardly any crockery, either. We had five cups, one each, but there were wine glasses aplenty, all borrowed from the various establishments we frequented on Leeson Street.
The bathroom had no shower. Even worse, the lavatory was blocked once for several weeks. The landlord was away, so we took to using the ladies in the nearby Burlington hotel as though it were our own. The chief drawback to this was that we had to dress up so as not to draw attention to ourselves. The trick was to scan the lobby, pretending that you were there to meet someone, before sneaking into the loo, toothbrush in pocket, to perform the daily ablutions.
We tried our best to keep the house clean, but no matter how much time we invested, the weekend would undo all our best intentions.
The squalor was embarrassing at times. I once went away to London with one of the girls from the house for Valentine’s weekend. We were both single and I ended up meeting a guy who said he’d come over to see me in Dublin two weeks later.
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But the day before he was due to arrive one of our other flatmates came out in red bites all over her body. We realised that the bites were from bed bugs and spent the entire day dousing the mattresses, duvets, sheets, towels and ourselves in powder. Then there was a frantic clean-up to do away with the evidence before he arrived.
When he got to the house, it had never been so clean and we ended up falling in love and going out for five years.
Although I still have great memories of my time in the mews, that lifestyle is only tolerable for so long. The location was unbeatable, but the arctic cold eventually got us down and we moved out sometime in 1999.
I couldn’t live in those conditions now. I’ve done my slumming, both as a student and as a traveller. Nowadays I’m too used to my creature comforts.
Interview by Alanna Gallagher