A House 1.6 Metres Wide Sold for $1.3 Million

Who would believe that a house built into a narrow passage between an apartment block and a clinic sold for 1.3 million dollars? It happened — and the reason it happened is one of the clearest lessons in real estate I know.

The house

Built in London, the house is only about 1.6 metres wide from side to side — one of the narrowest homes in the city. Stand in the middle and you can nearly touch both walls. By any ordinary measure it should be almost worthless: no front garden, no width, squeezed between two larger buildings like a book pushed onto a crowded shelf.

So how did this narrow house sell for that much?

Where the value actually came from

Although the house is less than two metres wide, it goes up five floors — so in total it has around 96 square metres of living space, two bedrooms, a modern kitchen and a small garden at the back. Narrow is not the same as small.

But the reason it sold for such a high price was not the floor space. It was the three things that priced it:

• Location. It stands in Shepherd's Bush, a sought-after neighbourhood in West London. The ground under a narrow house in the right street is worth more than the ground under a wide house in the wrong one.
• Creativity. The design is unusual, bold, and makes a gap nobody else wanted into a home somebody wanted badly. Somebody looked at a sliver of land and saw five floors.
• History. It is a known, storied building — and a story is something a buyer will pay for, because nobody else can offer it.

What this has to do with Addis Ababa

We are a city of awkward plots. Corner slivers, leftover strips beside a new tower, old family compounds with a shape no architect would choose. The usual reaction is to see those plots as problems — too small, too narrow, too strange to be worth much.

The narrow house argues the opposite. The value of land is set less by its shape than by three questions: Where is it? What can be imagined on it? And does it have a story that makes it one of a kind? I have written before about how land value in Addis is really set, and location was first on that list for the same reason it was first in London.

One caution, because every story like this invites one: a price in London tells you nothing about a price in Addis. The lesson is not the number. The lesson is what produced it.

So — would you?

If you found a house like that in Addis Ababa — narrow, modern, with a history — would you pay a high price for it? Tell me honestly. I suspect the answers will split the room.