I saw the following design travesties while looking at apartments this week:
Of a carpeted apartment, “The current occupant is a smoker. Don’t worry; we fully clean all the apartments before new tenants move in.”
A ninth-floor apartment with eastern exposure, overlooking a train yard, and beyond that, the Hudson. The apartment has large glass exterior windows in the living room. The bedroom, further inside, opens onto the living room with a pair of French (i.e. mostly glass) doors.
Being told not to worry about the guy sleeping on a futon in the living room.
A duplex with the living room and kitchen upstairs on the entry level, and the bedroom downstairs on the garden level. There’s a bathroom on each floor. The bathtub is in the upstairs one.
A building-wide wireless network; no Ethernet jacks.
Of an apartment listed as two-bedroom, “There’s a second door there because the state of New Jersey says that it can’t be a bedroom unless it has a window, so the door is there to make it a den.”
French doors opening out onto a two-foot-wide strip of grass surrounding the building. The strip is fenced about with a mostly-open ironwork lattice; the sidewalk is about a foot or two below the strip.
If you can see what’s wrong with these pictures, then you’re doing better than the owners.