Palatial living space, 12 rooms, 12 bathrooms, a large, three-sink kitchen for all my cooking experiments, and a spacious back garden to boot. As the global recession digs in its heels and utility bills soar sky high, I lean back in my desk chair and look out onto the trees and old stone steeples of the beautiful Hampstead Cemetery - a far site better than your concrete alternatives. With Hampstead Heath up the hill for morning runs, and my home being only a half-hour bike ride to work, I couldn't be happier. Especially since all this costs me only an unbelievable £60 a week, all bills included.

How does this add up? How can you find yourself a little piece of cake in this bread and butter climate? The answer is: become a property guardian, like me.

Having been given the hot tip from a fellow actor, I am, as of four months, a proud property guardian in London. I work with AD HOC, a company that provides the owners of vacant buildings with a security service by placing responsible, flexible, normally young, professionals in the buildings. As guardians, we get an interesting place to live, a feeling that we are contributing positively to our community by looking after a vacant building - in my case, a former nursing home - and all for an affordable rent in the most expensive city in the world. The building owners get virtually a 24-hour presence on their property for a fraction of the costs of security guards, and eyes on all their building's structure and contents, all done discretely with respect to the community surrounding it.

The property guardian model emerged in the Netherlands, and has now spread to Britain. With the threat of buildings being taken over by squatters, and property and mortgage sales almost at a standstill, it is not surprising that the numbers of properties and guardians that AD HOC are working with double every six months. They have also expanded from the capital to Leeds, Manchester and Brighton.

So how do companies like AD HOC work? Others in this business like Safe Estates, Camelot Guardians and Ambika work with more or less the same model. A building will become vacant for any number of reasons:
redevelopment projects, lengthy sales, planning permission applications, or waiting to come up for auction, to name a few. When AD HOC notices a building has been emptied, they offer their services.

There is no restriction on what kind of building they will work with, other than it being safe for a guardian to inhabit. They consider churches, vicarages, pubs, residential homes, hospitals, schools, warehouses, blocks of flats and, of course, houses.

AD HOC charges the owner £50 per week per building, negotiates the utilities and places guardians in the building. The number of guardians they place is dependent on what is needed to create an obvious presence in the building, but both guardians and AD HOC like the numbers being as small as possible, leaving the guardians with more space and enabling AD HOC to work with more buildings.

The company will pick a 'head' guardian to liaise communications.
There are six of us living in the nursing home: a couple on ground floor, another on first floor, I’m on the second and another lady on the third floor. We all have varying careers: a teacher, an urban designer, a set/costume designers and a musician. Being a free lance actor and movement director, I have moved a lot, constantly looking for ways to cut costs and maintain a good standard of living. The last place I lived in was a gorgeous two bedroom flat in Kensington and Chelsea, however to balance the rising cost of maintaining property, the landlord wanted to move two more people in. In my late 20's I no longer like living like a student and this current living situation allows me to save and look at buying in the future.

Getting a hold of us all might be a challenge, so, to co-ordinate various meetings with potential buyers, inspectors and gardeners, the head guardian will relay the message. In addition to these meetings AD HOC performs random checks on the building. The checks are non-invasive – they simply make sure there is a good standard of cleanliness, and that I have not sub-let the rest of my floor - all my ten spare rooms. It is a little absurd and at times spooky that my floor has ten empty rooms, so I have begun making the best of it; I have a living room, a music room, a play room, a dressing room, a yoga room and a shower room.

AD HOC pride themselves in their vetting and placement skills. They interview all their guardians and request the usual pieces of
identification: passport, bank statements, proof of income, a letter from a referee and a letter from your landlord. They explain the lie of the land: you will be settled with all the basic living requirements - a bathroom, toilet, kitchenette, heating, water and electricity - and in exchange you are asked sign a licence for living in and caring for the place as if it were your own.

So, what is the catch? For some, the 14-day warning period for relocation can be too unsettling, although Ad Hoc will re-locate you in one of their other buildings.

The only drawback I can think of is that I can't have parties in my amazing building. It's like the hotel from The Shining through and through. It would be wonderful for a Halloween party.