Tonight:
2°c
With its prime location, spacious rooms and 24-hour security, it ought to be London's ultimate bachelor flat.
However, this Oxford Street pad has a fundamental flaw as a desirable home — it is inside a shop.
John Lewis has created a fully functional flat on the third floor of its store. Complete with dining room, living room, shower room, garden terrace and kitchen, the 1,000-square-metre apartment is designed to inspire customers on how to decorate and fit out their home.
The store's half-year results, to be announced this month, are expected to have bounced back to pre-recession levels.
Last year it saw a 50 per cent fall in profits, to £20 million. But sales have jumped, particularly in the homewares department, where there has been a 17 per cent increase on last year.
From today to the end of the month shoppers will be invited inside the flat, as part of the retailer's London Living promotion. Furnishing advisers will offer tips on creating an ideal home.
Everything inside is John Lewis stock, including eyemasks and food. The showroom will also highlight bespoke services available at John Lewis, including “home visit” kitchen services, bedroom fitting and tailoring.
Managers said they wanted to make the flat look as much like a London apartment as possible.
Operations manager Kim Seymour said: “Customers don't always know we have a home service offer and this is a great way to demonstrate all the exciting things we do. The flat took 12 hours to create and was assembled overnight.”
My long day's journey into night on Level 3
Christian Koch
John Lewis is the kind of place where simpering couples leave wedding lists for toasters and crockery. Never in its 146-year history has it been a destination where you'd want to bunk down for the night.
I was invited to sample life in this goldfish bowl. The experience is less Truman Show, more drifting listlessly like the beardy Tom Hanks character who occupies the airport in Terminal.
Save for one bemused Middle Eastern family, customers thunder past oblivious. They've clearly glimpsed more unusual sights than some bloke scoffing microwave lasagne in a department store.
Strangeness sets in once customers leave at 8pm. First, the boredom.
For all its state-of-the-art technology, there's no aerial for the Panasonic 3D TV, no internet for the iMac, and the iPod docking system's security alarm whirrs every time it's lifted. All you're left with is some insane coffee table reading (Dogs in Vogue, anyone?) and increasingly paranoid thoughts (were those mannequins doing that 10 minutes ago?)
About 30 people work overnight, so a cavalcade passes your bed before dawn. There's the pair of paint-spattered decorators, the security man, hard-hat builders, and Carlos the Peruvian cleaner who claims his Lima house has a lavatory bigger than my bedroom. There's also an alleged third-floor ghost (a lady in a white dress).
Eventually you become self-sufficient. You wash in the customer loos. Tinker tunelessly on the brasserie piano. Just after midnight the urge to run riot takes over. What first? Eat the food hall out of cheese? Spray the store's dearest aftershave? No chance. A trip is curtailed when a security man pops up, dispensing sales patter on bargains.
Bed, obviously, beckons. But it is like trying to sleep in a supermax prison. The ultra-bright lighting is never turned off, while security staff mooch past every hour, as if on suicide watch. There's a cochlea-perforating noise – a melange of extractor fans, Hoovers and Tannoy announcements.
Eventually, slumber is achieved. But at 5.14am it is time to wake up, as buses start braking in Oxford Street and trailers full of food deliveries arrive.
Reader views (1)
IKEA has done more-or-less the same thing for years!
- David Cunard, Palm Springs CA ex-pat, 07/09/2010 02:56
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