The Stay Club Colindale

Stayed here for two and a half weeks a few years back (in 2016). The building was partially under construction yet, still the lower floors were all set. The location is fairly great, since it's essentially next to Colindale Tube station and you can get to most places downtown rather quickly. We had English lessons as part of the experience (not sure if that's the standard pack or if it's just a lodging site nowadays), which were truly enjoyable. My room's design was a bit strange: the bathroom is in the middle of it and basically everyone can see your silhouette as you shower. Also, the top beds kind of tried to collapse towards the wall. Moreover, the room faced the underground station so we heard the lovely voice saying "The next train is to Edgware. Please mind the gap" 24/7, since that line has night service. I didn't mind though because that was sort of soothing. The employees here were always very kind and attentive. We had no problems whatsoever.

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE DECIDING TO STAY HERE. Personally being a student, this has been the worst accommodation I have lived in. I don’t even know where to start and I truly wish I checked the reviews of the place before moving here. As mentioned quite a few times in other reviews, the start of the tenancy was fine, however the rest of our tenancy until now has been an absolute nightmare. Issues started when the accommodation got filled and booked with more people and as it started to get busy, it will take you roughly 30-40 minutes wait time to get a free elevator to simply go downstairs and do your laundry. This has resulted in me having to do my laundry at 10pm and not only because of busy lifts, but also the fact that in the communal laundry room, I have had multiple people grab my laundry (I always showed up on time BEFORE my laundry finished its cycle) and attempt to remove it, to the point where I had arguments with multiple tenants as to why they found it necessary to touch someone else’s belongings. Secondly, as a female resident living in an accommodation filled with 90% middle aged men has been one of the most uncomfortable experiences - and this is because I would get unwanted stares and even whistles - plus, the advertisement of this being a ‘student accommodation’ is really and truly not what it is. I completely understand students come from different walks of life, but I remember at the start of my tenancy, there were young tenants like my age living here and soon they all moved as soon as the increase of non-students started living in the flats. In my own flat I don’t feel safe to leave the room by myself. No one should ever have to feel this way in their own place and paying an expensive amount of rent to feel like this too. But, it gets worse. There is (not was) a mice problem. The mice would run about the hallway and INTO YOUR ROOMS, which is what happened to me. We obviously told staff members and they quickly gave us a temporary room to stay in only for a couple nights while they called pest control. Pest control placed mice traps you could easily buy yourself from the store. We were given a new permanent room to move into as the mice problem was never resolved and we felt uncomfortable staying in our original room. We were pushed to move years of our belongings in a day and half because THEY WERE MOVING SOMEONE ELSE IN THE MICE INFESTED ROOM! We were shocked and disgusted to find out this information considering the problem of the pests is unresolved because when we moved the last few bits of our belongings today and there were still mice crawling through the ceiling of the room! We were told that ‘this situation has never happened before’ and quickly found out this is a blatant lie as we found that a few other residents on the same floor had the same issues as well and moved out. When contacting the managers and staff regarding issues within the flat, we were only given an email or number to call - so don’t expect your problems (no matter how big) to be resolved straight away. Only positive is that the staff have always been super nice and accommodating, however management regarding the state of the place is very poor. I have never written reviews like this, but it has gotten to the point where people need to know the true nature and state of this accommodation.

Me & my partner booked to stay in The Stay Club Colindale for a year. At first everything seemed fine, but the longer we stayed here the more of a nightmare it became. Firstly, as mentioned in many other reviews the cleaners barely clean the rooms. Upon arrival in our new room, we noticed a brown crust around the edges of the shower head and toilet seat. When flagged to members behind the front desk nothing was done about this. The toilets also constantly clog & the water pressure here is very weak. After staying here for a month we decided to rearrange our room a little - when we moved the bed, we found dust caked to the floor, old socks from the previous tenant and the previous tenants photo ID underneath the bed. This is unacceptable & disgusting, especially considering that when we moved in the Covid pandemic had just begun. Having another person's used socks under our bed seems like it should be some kind of health hazard. The beds also don’t have soft mattresses and are pretty much rock hard storage containers with blankets thrown over the top of them. Lifts take forever to arrive at your floor. While moving in from the ground floor to floor 2, we had a maximum lift wait time of 2 hours. You’d think with an accommodation of 18+ floors there would be more than 4 lifts. Also, despite social distancing posters plastered up around the accommodation stating “only one household should be allowed in the lift at a time”, nobody follows the Covid social distancing rules. You’ll often find 8 people crammed into one small lift at a time and staff does nothing to enforce the social distancing rules. Despite being advertised as a Student accommodation we rarely find other university students here. The majority of tenants are previous criminals who have just been released from prison, adults learning english as we’ve been told there is an english learning program here. (this isn’t great for universities looking to make friends, when 80% of the people don’t have a conversational level of english) and a disproportionate amount of middle aged men. I understand that students can decide to study later in life but this isn’t your typical University student crowd. Amongst all these problems and more (e.g I once went to the library to study and found a homeless man sleeping in there), Mice have now infiltrated all the rooms on floor 2. We had often seen mice scurrying along the corridors and they'd finally made their way into our room. When we flagged the mice issue to the manager he lied to us and told us this was the first report of mice in the building - we later found out that a few months prior, a girl on our floor had moved out of her room because mice had taken over her room. We were lucky enough to get moved to another room, but some people have been refused a room change even with mice running around on floor 2 at night. Some people have resorted to putting towels under their doors so mice don’t crawl in. I will say pest control did come within the same day of us flagging this issue and placed down traps everywhere, but the efforts to remove the mice has been largely unsuccessful as even months later we still occasionally see mice running around the apartment building. After being told we have a new room, we were pressured to move all of our things out of the old mice infested room into the new room, despite telling staff members behind the desk that my partner and I both work weekends. When we told the staff members that we wouldn't be able to move over the weekend due to work. They told us we had too as they had checked someone in to our mice infested room. This means a new arrival is staying in our old mice infested room unknowingly. This is really awful. The only good thing I have to say about this place is that Staff members are friendly but they need to work on their communication skills as I often find myself reporting issues multiple times to different people. They also often don’t have solutions to our problems and point us to an email address or number which is of little help and doesn't solve our issues.

Went house viewing here and I must say the name is apt! The amenities are awesome for students and young professionals. It boasts of a concierge, private cinema, library, restaurant with a terrace and night club. Oh, and you get a distance at the pure gym situated in the same building. All not functioning at the moment due to covid restrictions ofcourse. But its exciting to think of how alive it would be when life goes back to normal( if it ever will ...). Super close to the train station as well! Fingers crossed on where I place my final offer!