Locked in a Staircase - EEK! - Tuesday, 21 September

For many years I dreamt of owning a Paris apartment and renting it out when I wasn’t using it, but of course it was just a dream - not really practical or justifiable, especially when the city started clamping down on these kinds of arrangements a few years ago.  But for the past couple years I’ve been watching various “fractional ownership” schemes In Paris - these are like timeshares, but you actually own a share of an apartment and can sell it anytime to anyone you want, or bequeath it.  Generally you get four weeks a year to use it (the usage schemes differ by developer).  You can trade residency weeks with other share owners of the same apartment, or let personal friends use your weeks, you just can’t offer to rent out your weeks on any online or other such public market.

This summer I took the plunge and bought a share of La Lanterne du Marais.  

https://adrianleeds.com/explore-properties-for-sale/fractional-ownership/shared-property/la-lanterne-du-marais/

I was a little nervous because the apartment is one flight up with no elevator in this 17th century building, but I had the developer, Adrian Leeds Group, take a photo of the staircase for me to hopefully make a good decision about whether climbing those stairs would be do-able.  I decided in the affirmative.

Today the developer gave me the 6-character code that one enters on a keypad to unlock the external door of the building so that I could let myself in to try the stairs.  (The apartment is in the demolition stage - the photos you see on the property’s webpage are mockups - so I couldn’t see the apartment itself.)

Well, the news wasn’t good.  “Objects appear larger” in photos, and I could get a good toehold on the first couple stairs but where the staircase took a tight turn, the stairs would be just too dangerously shallow for me, even with its good solid railing and my cane (especially if I was tired, or if my legs were weak/painful, or if I was hauling a bunch of shopping, or if I’d had too much wine with dinner!).  So I backed down the couple stairs I had climbed and turned to leave.

This is where it got scary.  Normally external doors open inward (which this one did) and there’s a handle on the inside of the door that you can grab to pull the door open after you’ve pushed a button that unlocks it.  The problem: no such handle.  There was a stub for a doorknob but it was too small for me to get a good grip to pull open the heavy door after pushing the unlock button.  EEK!  It was like adding insult to injury.  What to do?  If only I was carrying a big pair of pliers in my purse (sadly, I wasn’t!).  No other residents were arriving or leaving.  After several attempts to open the door, I managed to sit down on one of the stairs and email the developer.  I also texted the owner of the Airbnb I’m renting to see if he could come and help me.  Crickets.  (They both did respond later in the evening.)

Happily, after a few seemingly interminable minutes, the door opened as the marvelous interior designer Martine de Matteo arrived with a colleague to work on the apartment!  (She has overseen amazing redesigns and transformations of almost all of the apartments that the real estate agent and developer, Adrian Leeds, finds for people - if you have watched House Hunters International you have probably seen Martine and her work.)  I told them my story and departed.  Hopefully they had the necessary wrenches or doorknobs to open the door when they left!

So I’ll be selling my share of the apartment.  Per the bylaws, I have to offer it first to the 12 other share-owners, but if none of them are interested I can sell it to anyone else I want.  It will be fine for able-bodied people like y’all, so let me know if you want to talk!

The story gets a little longer.  Last week I saw that one of the owners of another of Adrian’s fractional ownership properties, a studio with an elevator, was selling their share to buy the one remaining share of La Lanterne du Marais.  I wrote to see if I could get in to view the property and maybe buy a share of it instead.  Unfortunately (for me), that one available share sold today.  

So the search goes on.