His apartment in Brockley, south London, occupies a section of an 1870s house now carved into five flats. When Guthrie first saw it, the place was full of the perfunctory fixes described on social media as “landlord specials”. Odd design decisions spoke of carelessness, partitions made the flat feel cramped. In the bathroom, the home’s impressively high 3.2m ceiling had been lowered, leaving a useless void above. Walls were drowned in what Guthrie calls “yucky magnolia” and woodchip-textured wallpaper. “It was really neglected, but it just had something about it,” he says.
