Why a warehouse is not a hotel
A hotel is built to receive strangers. There is a lobby, a lift, a desk, a corridor with numbers on the doors, and somebody paid to help when something goes wrong. A converted warehouse in Shoreditch was built to take in timber and send out furniture. The streets around Curtain Road were the heart of London's furniture trade in the nineteenth century, the printers came after, and the buildings they left are six storeys of brick with a street door, a stair and nobody sitting at a desk.
That is why so many flat visits in this part of London need three more lines in the first message than any hotel booking does. Get them right and she is at your door on the minute. Leave them out and she is on the pavement in the rain, reading a panel of unlabelled buttons, while the start of your evening slips.
The first line: which door
Give the street the door is actually on, which is not always the street the building is named after. Corner warehouses often have their address on one road and the residents' entrance round the side on another. Many have a goods entrance, a loading bay or an old shopfront that looks like the way in and is not. Some sit behind a yard with a gate, and the gate has a code.
One sentence covers it: the street, the number, and something she will see when she gets there, the black door beside the shutter or the gate next to the bike racks. If there is a code, put it in the confirming message rather than the first one. Nell reads the whole thing back to you in writing before anybody sets off, so a mistake is caught at the desk and not on the pavement.
The second line: what the buzzer says
Buzzer panels in conversions are a lottery. Some carry names, some carry flat numbers, some carry a company that moved out years ago, and some carry nothing at all. Tell the desk exactly what is written beside your button, even if it is wrong, because the label is what she will be looking for, not your name.
If the entry phone is unreliable, say so and plan to come down and open the door yourself when she arrives. That is not a failing of the building. It is simply how a lot of warehouse flats in Hackney and E2 work, and saying it at the start removes the only awkward minute the evening might otherwise have had.
The third line: the floor, and the stair
Say which floor, and then say how she gets up to it. A lift is one answer. A goods lift that needs a key is another. A stair is the commonest, and stairs in these buildings vary a great deal: stone steps worn into dips, steel treads with gaps between them, timber flights that turn every half storey, lit by a switch that goes off after a minute.
This is the line that decides what she wears. For a hotel she dresses for a lobby and a lift. For five flights of stone she dresses for five flights of stone, in a boot or a flat shoe that still suits the evening, and arrives looking composed rather than like someone who has just climbed a building in heels. Nobody minds being told the stair is long. Everybody minds finding out on the second landing.
The same terms as a hotel, word for word
A flat visit is booked, priced and confirmed exactly as a hotel room call is. An hour is £250 whether the door is on Great Eastern Street or beside the water in Bow, and her journey is inside the figure. The desk checks the address, the buzzer and the floor once, just as it would check a hotel, a room number and the name a room is held under.
If you would like to compare the two, our note on the the old town hall walks through how a lobby arrival runs in E2. The difference is only ever those three lines. Everything else, the written confirmation, the arrival minute, the fee handed to her in person once she is inside, is identical.
Companions who take the stairs in their stride
Angelika is genuinely interested in how the old workshops of EC2A became homes, and she will have read your building from the pavement before she reaches the top of the stair. Michelle works the quiet side of Shoreditch and E2, is tall and entirely calm, and has seen more buzzer panels than most postmen. Milena, from the Kingsland Road strip, is the tallest of the three and the least concerned by a long climb.
All three are on the statuesque shortlist, the nine women on this site from 172 cm up, and all three dress for a stair when they know there is one. Angelika also appears on the toned list. Anyone on the board will visit a flat on exactly the same terms.
What to send, all in one message
Name, day, start time and length. Then the address with the street the door is on, what the buzzer says, the floor, and one line about the lift or the stair. That is the whole of it, and it takes less time to write than this paragraph took to read. The booking page sets out the rest of the sequence step by step.
Nell answers with the companion's name, the figure and the minute she expects to be at your street door. If anything about the building changes in the meantime, the lift breaks down or the gate code is reset, write in and say so. It is far better known at the desk than discovered on the doorstep.
Filed under: most of the names in this note also sit on the statuesque list in the shortlists.