Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, this wasn’t – at least not yet – and it probably passed much of the country by, especially given the rival distractions of recent weeks. It was nonetheless a lawsuit that will have been followed in compulsive detail by at least two groups of people: those who own their own flats – who are technically leaseholders but prefer to think of themselves as owner-occupiers – and the freeholders and managers of their blocks. Oh, and never forget the lawyers.
Wooden floor advocates will argue until the cows come home that modern technology means that noise is no issue
The case, heard at Central London County Court, pitted Sergey and Maria Grazhdankin against their upstairs neighbours Medhi Guissi and Meriem El Harouchi, and centred on the perennial issue, for flat-dwellers, of noise. But the reason the case commanded so much attention was that the Grazhdankins’s complaints concerned not just any sort of noise, but the noise generated by upstairs neighbours living in a flat with wooden floors. Oh yes, and the flats concerned cost more than £1 million apiece, are in a private Art Deco block in West London (which looks better in real life than in the pictures), and the warring neighbours – Grazhdankin being in insurance and Guissi in banking – seemed well able to afford their day in court.
The case brought by the Grazhdankins was that they had lived peacefully (in every sense) for many years until the upstairs flat was vacated by the elderly lady who had lived there and Guissi and his young family moved in. There followed a total ‘refurb’, as they say, which included the replacement of carpet with wooden floors – after which the Grazhdankins said they could hear pretty much everything that went on in the upstairs flat, to the point where the noise was like ‘torture’ and they felt they were living in a flat-share.
Which is where I should declare my interest. After more than 20 years, I have just moved out of my flat of a similar vintage in a different part of London. And in all that time perhaps the most divisive issue among residents was the matter of wooden floors. Needless to say, as wooden floors increasingly became the interior design feature of choice, the floor question became more and more polarising.
In our block there was a complicating factor. As in many such blocks, the lease requires everyone to lay carpets throughout. But there was a time when this wasn’t enforced – although it is now. So some flats have wooden floors, but others do not, and new owners must fit carpets. It became an issue when I was selling my (carpeted) flat. Quite a few potential buyers wanted to put in wooden floors, and it was a deal-breaker when I told them they couldn’t.
Feelings run extraordinarily high. Wooden floor advocates will argue until the cows come home that modern technology means that noise is no issue. Their floors will be at least as quiet, if not quieter, than carpet. Those who live under them may disagree. The trouble is that, until said floor and its supposed soundproofing are in place, there is no way of anyone knowing, by which time it is too late. Those who have laid the new flooring have spent the money and designed their rooms and understandably resist being asked to rip it up and start again.
As was the experience of the Grazhdankins with their neighbours in Earl’s Court. In the end, the judge upheld their complaint, awarding them £16,000 and a still-to-be-agreed share of the £250,000 legal costs. The finding was that the floor, or at least the intended sound-proofing layer, had been incorrectly installed so that it didn’t work as it should. It appears that Guissi and his wife have now laid carpets in most of their flat, and the noise is now to an extent muffled.
Now, I realise that all this will seem to many a trivial spat between people with more money than sense. And written comments below the line of the various reports of this case show two quite different responses.
The first is bafflement: bafflement about how such a seemingly mundane decision about what you put on the floor of your home can escalate into a legal case costing hundreds of thousands of pounds; bafflement that anyone should pay upwards of £1 million to live in a flat, when for the same money they could – in their view – get a nice house with a garden, and bafflement that noise from a young family and feet on floors should be a source of irritation, let alone litigation.
For the rest – many of whom say they have experienced similarly unbearable noise from upstairs neighbours installing wooden floors – there is no question. All leases on upstairs flats should stipulate carpeting, and the rule should be enforced. That so many people seem not to understand this only proves to them that, for many in the UK, London and flat-dwelling are a foreign country.
For my part, I am not sure that this court judgment has done much to settle the quarrels that still seethe in many blocks of flats between impassioned devotees of wooden floors and their furious opponents. The £16,000 award to the Grazhdankins is not a lot in this league, and the finding seems not to have been that wooden floors were unacceptable, but that the soundproofing had been wrongly fitted. The argument, it seems, is doomed to go on. Meanwhile, if you are thinking of moving and prefer a quiet life, you might think of checking the lease conditions on flooring – and whether they are enforced.
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