The Collective: inside London’s most luxurious commune

There’s a luxury spa and weekly pizza nights (but the rooms are tiny). Samuel Fishwick spends a night at The Collective — London’s new co-habiting megaspace 
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New buildings have growing pains. Ankit Love, a 33-year-old fashion designer with a yogi’s wispy build, has lived for a fortnight at The Collective, a sleek, 10-storey glass-banked beauty rising like a space freighter from the industrial hinterland of Old Oak, North Acton. Most of the time it’s been a blast: there’s a cinema with beanbags, a games room and a sun terrace where he takes part in 7am yoga classes. The only problem? ‘We have a disco laundrette — an actual disco laundrette — where you can switch on music and lights at the touch of a button’, he says. ‘It’s fun, but you try putting your whites through when there’s a flashmob breaking out behind you.’

This is the future: ‘co-living’, souped-up digs for young professionals, dreamt up in San Francisco by Elon Musk-types wanting to close the gap between their work and personal lives. It’s like university halls — if university halls came with a luxury spa and masseuse. You have your own bedroom (there are 550 of them, with prices starting from £199 per week), but everything else is communal, from the shared kitchen areas to the library where residents all donate a book, and a downstairs shop (currently having the finishing touches put to it). The price of your room is all-inclusive and access-all-areas, although you’ll have to pay for your own food. Currently The Collective is only 50 per cent occupied after soft-launching in May, but by the end of its official opening month in September the owners expect it to be at full capacity.

As I arrive to check in for 24 hours, the building glints in the midday sun. Barges float lazily along the adjacent Grand Union Canal, while the sound of happy chatter floats from a patio by the water. In the foyer, soft neon lights bathe the concierge desk, pony-tailed dudes shoot the breeze with ageing tech gurus, and artisan bread is out behind the ground-floor restaurant’s bar. Even the bar stools have bicycle pedals. Wherever you look, people are coming, going or, in one corner, tinkling Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude on a baby grand piano.

I find Ed Thomas, 25, the building’s community manager, trying to track down kayaks on his smartphone. ‘Someone said they wanted to take a romantic paddle down to Maida Vale for a cappuccino on our community’s Facebook group, so we’re trying to make that a reality,’ he says. Dancers, chefs, tech entrepreneurs, civil servants and a crane driver live here, commuting by bicycle down the towpath or taking the Central Line from nearby North Acton Tube station.

For these early adopters this isn’t just living, it’s a way of life. ‘Everywhere I’ve lived in London I’ve had problems: too expensive, too disconnected or stuck in a contract with the wrong crowd,’ says Anso Kristiansen, a 29-year-old Danish-Korean ballet student at the London Contemporary Dance School. ‘Here, I’ve got everything I need under one roof and I’m always meeting new people.’

Residents unwind in the games room
AJ Levy

Kristiansen and her Collective neighbours aren’t the only ones falling for the co-living lifestyle. In Poplar, Canning Town, Epsom, Stepney Green and Lewisham, Fizzy Living, a pioneering property developer dedicated to young professionals, is ‘reinventing renting’, with £1,340 per month one-beds that include access to a shared roof garden and a pet station for cleaning after muddy walks. In Wembley, developers Quintain opened Tipi in March, offering a similar package, while Essential Living’s Vantage Point at Archway Tower boasts shared amenities from £375 per week. So far though, no one has matched The Collective for sheer size and ambition.

The Collective: in pictures

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Back in the building, I find a crowd huddled around a WiFi hotspot in the ground-floor foyer, working remotely behind MacBook Airs (a dedicated co-working space opens later in the year). The building is geared up for nomadic globetrotters and transient careerists who are less material based. Company CEO Reza Merchant, 28, says we’re in an age of ‘suspended adulthood’ — the average age of marriage has climbed from 20 to 29 in 40 years while 91 per cent of Millennials report that they don’t plan to be in the job they’re in for more than three years. The Collective’s no-strings lifestyle appeals to these types — you don’t need to accumulate stuff, it’s all there for you to use. Even your linen’s pressed and readied for you. As one resident puts it, it’s about ‘freeing up bandwidth’: amenities are paid for with one bill and while there’s no parking, two ZipCars are available at the press of an app. There’s even talk of an on-demand wardrobe service being introduced, delivering socks, T-shirts and other essentials to your door on the day.

AJ Levy

Convenience is not the only draw to this new London lifestyle. They’re also looking to troubleshoot loneliness here. According to the ONS, 34 per cent of people say they often feel lonely in the UK, while research by the charity network ACEVO found young Londoners are twice as likely to be lonely as the national average. ‘Because I work in a corporate job, I wanted something a bit more vibrant to come home to,’ says resident Vijay Kannan, 20, who’s on a placement at healthcare company General Electric in Amersham. ‘You can be who you want to be here, do exactly what you want and there are 500 people who feel the same way as you do.’

Acquaintances come and go with the hours. Just before 5pm, I squeeze in a game of pool with a new friend named Fortune. After dinner by the canal, I sneak my head into the disco laundrette, but there aren’t any flash-mobs here, just the whine of the washing machines. Midnight is for gamers, as the Playstation whirs in the games room and a bottle of vodka is passed around, while ping-pong bats thwack back and forth over the table-tennis table. You can see the appeal.

Night owls gather around the piano for evening singalongs on Thursday, Friday and weekends by the concierge desk, or in the Secret Garden for DJ sets, then head out to nearby Paradise by Way of Kensal Green. I’m told there’s a lot of hooking up. ‘You’ve got young, single people here,’ says Love. ‘It’s like the palace of youth hostels.’

Taking in a film in The Collective’s cinema 
AJ Levy

It’s not all fun and games, however. The rooms are micro-sized, and as I begin to think about tucking myself in for the night I wonder how anyone can sleep comfortably in a space that, if not Harry Potter-cupboard small, is definitely dinky. ‘You have to think about how much you’re willing to sacrifice,’ says Erik Vonk, who works securing funding for Dutch entrepreneurs from the Chambers of Commerce. ‘Yes, the rooms are small here, but the community has such value. Here, you’re not only recognised, but people say hello and ask you how you are.’ It’s not cheap — most are paying £1,000 per month is for a single, 150 sq ft ‘crash pad’. Mine is part of a ‘Twodio’ — two single bedrooms, and a shared kitchen hob. (There are larger, more expensive 300 sq ft studio rooms available.) It’s cramped, and my feet hit the end of the bed.

That said, Thomas and co are always trying to push things forward, analysing data to make improvements. Everything’s monitored, from numbers signed up for morning HIIT sessions to food served in the restaurant. CCTV is everywhere. It’s a little Big Brother, but my stuff’s safe, and it has lead to a pizza deal whereby the more people are with you, the cheaper the food is. Plus, new developments like this are a shot in the arm for the local community. The influx of people entering the area means more money for businesses. Thomas and a group of volunteers have enrolled to help keep the canal clean. And, with the arrival of Crossrail and HS2, the area is about to boom. The Collective has got in early.

AJ Levy

It’s all about economies of scale, Merchant says. ‘To provide the amenities, and the sheer manpower to keep this going you need to reach a critical mass in your population.’ The more people who take up co-living in London, the bigger the rooms will get, the more swanky the saunas, the smaller the carbon footprint. Even if you can’t see past the surface flaws, you can buy into the philosophy. Give me a larger living space and I’d move here. It’s certainly given me room to think.

The next day I wake up, unfold myself and shake off the sleepdust with early-morning yoga — not very me, but the building’s got me in the mood to try new things. Maybe that’s its secret, I think, as I tuck into my full English at the restaurant. The sun’s blazing as I leave. A new dawn? Maybe.

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