Regular people of Melbourne, congratulations! The housing market is so deeply fucked up that you can now pay $210 a week to live in a literal bathroom! Free market capitalism is great and I love life!
I wish this was parody my dear friends. I wish I could say I was having a little “tee hee” moment with you.
But I’m not. Join me on this tour of rental hell from Fitzroy, Melbourne.
As you can see, this is a bathroom someone has put an IKEA loft bed in.
No shade to the loft bed. I actually have a loft bed because I live in a small rental room (a “bedroom” which is actually a “study”) in Sydney’s Inner West. My loft bed is great because it means I can also fit a desk and a wardrobe in my room instead of just … a bed.
However.
Putting a loft bed in a bathroom does not a bedroom maketh.
It turns out that the story of the property is a pretty fkn wild yarn. It features allegations of hidden cameras, pissed off ex-tenants and a gold theft.
According to public records, the house is owned by a man called Karl Dimitri Kachami. He was sentenced to four years in jail in November 2020 over a gold heist.
Yep, Kachami stole $2.5 million of gold and over $700,000 of cash from Melbourne Gold Company with the help of an accomplice.
The Age interviewed former tenants of the boarding house. One woman told the publication she would open a “good bottle of French red” when she heard about Kachami’s sentencing. She’d rented a room back in 2009.
“He left flowers at my door on the day I moved in,” she told the publication.
“I also remember on that day he had bragged about how strong he was and how he was taller than me even though he came up to my mouth.”
You may suspect this is the last of it, but no!
In 2009 Kachami was also accused of monitoring tenants at 35 Brunswick Street using concealed cameras as per The Age. Police did investigate the situation but no charges were laid.
According to The Age, he wrote a letter dated July 23, 2009 where he admitted that there was a “surveillance installation” in the common areas of the house. But he said they hadn’t been operated since 2006.
There is also a whole Facebook page dedicated to warning potential tenants from renting a room in the house.
But wait, there’s more! It looks like this exact rental room has been leased out before but for a fucking whopping $290 a week instead. The Daily Mail ran an article in October 2019 which seems to show the exact same “bed” “room”. I’d recognise that weird bubbly wall art anywhere.
So look, if you needed any more proof that the housing market in Australia’s fucked, here it is. Wild backstory or no wild backstory I think we can all agree. A loft bed in a bathroom does not equal a habitable living space.
