Tiny Islington house could be London's smallest

Great news, you can buy a house in London's fashionable Islington for just £275,000. It's on one of the prettiest and most desirable streets in the area, where houses typically fetch more than £1.7 million. There's only one slight downside: it's just 188 square feet in size. To put that in perspective, you can get family tents that are larger.

The architect has done an impressive job of squeezing a functioning home into what was once a small storage shed. The 'bedroom' is essential a bed-sized shelf above the front door. Above the bed, filling every inch between the platform and the ceiling, are cupboards which should house a particularly modest wardrobe.

Downstairs there's a kitchen area, which is roughly the size of a prison cell. Then you step up onto a storage box which functions as the living room floor. Finally, you clamber up onto the sideboard (which is a continuation of the kitchen unit) in order to climb up the floating steps built into the wall to take you to the sleeping platform. There's also a tiny cubicle combining a wet room with the toilet.

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Does it appeal?
In theory it's a home big enough for two - and you can apparently store mattresses in the storage box so you can even have guests to stay. In reality you need to be nimble, have a head for heights, own very few belongings, and enjoy the close proximity of others.

The estate agent is pragmatic, stating in the particulars that it would make an ideal buy-to-let or pied-à-terre. In this context it makes perfect sense: it's near the City, offers more flexibility than a hotel room, and you can come and go as you please. Naturally it requires more of an outlay than a hotel room, but when you eventually sell up you should make your money back - so it'll prove a cheaper option overall.

According to Zoopla, its the most viewed property on the website at the moment. However, it's fair to assume that the vast majority of people are simply trying to understand how a home can be so small - rather than being serious buyers.

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Tiny houses
While house prices are so high and the options for London living are so restricted, tiny properties keep appearing on the market.

And while this house may be minuscule, it's arguably going to be a far nicer place to live than the flats we reported on in January this year which are known as semi studios because they are considered to be too small to be worth calling studios. These included a Pimlico bedsit little bigger than a single bedroom, into which the owner had crammed a bed, a fridge, a microwave and chest of drawers in order to call it a home.

The Islington house can also claim to be incredibly spacious compared to some of the tiny flats that have sold in London over the years. These include a studio 'apartment' near Harrods, which was on the market in 2012 for £90,000. It was just 10ft 4in by 8ft 4in.

There was also the former cleaner's cupboard in Chelsea, which measured 11ft 3in by 7ft 3in. It was on sale on 2007, and despite the fact that it needed complete modernisation, it was priced at £170,000.

But smallest of all is the 7ft 6in by 3ft 4in studio in Notting Hill - which was fashioned out of a cupboard in the 1980s. It hasn't been on the market recently, but has been valued at £100,000.

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