Grosvenor Terrace · Camberwell SE5
Camberwell,
looking north.
Five-bedroom duplex penthouse on Grosvenor Terrace, SE5. Two terraces, one for the morning sun, one for the sunset. Twelve minutes to London Bridge. The skyline view came included.
Register your interestThe home
Five bedrooms, four bathrooms, two floors.
The top floor has the principal bedroom, three more doubles, a small study, and the family bathroom. The lower floor is the open kitchen-diner-living, plus the guest bathroom. Both terraces open off the lower floor, which is where most of the day-to-day happens. Cooking, eating, working, weather-watching.
Just under 2,000 sq ft total. Lift in the building. Off-street parking. Secure bike storage. Gas central heating. Share of freehold.
The view
What you see from here.
Six years of photographs taken from this address. The London Eye, the BT Tower, the Shard, plus the kind of weather most people pay to watch from hotels.
Floorplan
Two floors, drawn out.
1,916 sq ft of duplex penthouse. Kitchen, dining and reception on the lower floor — with the morning balcony and south-facing terrace. Five bedrooms and three bathrooms upstairs, connected by a double-height central staircase.
Inside
The layout.
A double-height central stair connects the two floors. Bedrooms upstairs, kitchen and reception downstairs. Almost every room has full-height glazing or a window that opens onto a city view.
Outside
The terraces.
The south-facing one gets the morning sun. The other one gets the sunset and most of the summer cooking. Both are usable from April through October. A few weeks either side if you don't mind a jumper.
From the owners
We made it work. So can you.
We stretched to buy this place. Then we worked out how to make it pay for itself.
For six years we ran one of the spare bedrooms on Airbnb (five hundred-plus stays before we stopped counting) and let another to a long-term lodger. Between the two, the rooms covered the entire mortgage every month. Not most of it. All of it.
Today both rooms are with long-term lodgers at £1,200 and £1,400 a month. That's £2,600 a month of room income before you've even thought about Airbnb again. The Airbnb setup is still there if you want to switch the third room back on: bedding, lockable door, en-suite, the cleaning rhythm we used to use. We just stopped because two long-term lodgers turned out to be a lot less work than two hundred guest turnovers a year.
A note on the practical side. Under HMRC's Rent-a-Room scheme, the first £7,500 of lodger income each year is tax-free for a live-in landlord. Most high-street lenders are fine with the arrangement provided you tell them. Southwark's short-let licensing has shifted a couple of times since we started, so anyone planning to repeat the Airbnb part should check the current rules with their solicitor before banking on the income. We'd rather you have the real picture than the polished one.
For the record, we didn't buy this place to run an Airbnb. We bought it because we wanted to live in it. The rooms-paying-for-themselves part came afterwards, when we sat down with the spreadsheet and realised we'd stretched too far. If you're sitting at a similar spreadsheet right now, that part still works.
Location
SE5. Twelve minutes to London Bridge.
Transport
- Kennington station 15 min walk · Northern Line
- Elephant & Castle Short bus ride · Bakerloo, Northern, Thameslink, Overground
- Bus routes 12, 35, 40, 45, 68, 148, 171, 176, 468
- Segregated cycle lanes; Santander bikes
- Secure cycle storage
On the doorstep
- Burgess Park Southwark’s largest green space. Lakeside walks, tennis, ParkRun.
- Walworth Road Independent eateries, supermarkets, library co-working hub.
- Camberwell Green and the galleries of Peckham, ten minutes south
- Borough Market and Bermondsey Street, fifteen minutes north
Specifications
The detail.
- Property type
- Duplex apartment
- Bedrooms
- Five (four doubles + study/guest room)
- Bathrooms
- Four (two en-suite)
- Reception
- Open-plan kitchen / dining / living
- Internal area
- 1,916 sq ft / 178 m²
- Outdoor space
- Two private terraces (one south-facing)
- Parking
- One secure off-street space + cycle storage
- Tenure
- Share of Freehold
- Lease remaining
- 975 years
- Ground rent
- Ask agent
- Council tax band
- E (Southwark)
- EPC rating
- C
- Heating
- Gas central
Register your interest
Arrange a viewing.
Enquiries go to Daniel Cobb, who handles the listing. They usually come back within the working day.