Sub-Sub-Sub Sublet

Converted dining rooms, converted living rooms, a sheet or shower curtain for a door . . . now the Times reports on a $35-per-month hole in the wall, which literally is a hole in the wall:

One night recently, a group of architecture students staying up late in a loft in Brooklyn took to amusing themselves by stuffing a mattress into a hole cut into the wall above a bedroom door. Then they tried the mattress out for comfort. Not half bad! It occurred to one of them, Nick Freeman, that people might pay money to call that elevated mattress home.

So Mr. Freeman posted an ad on the Web site Craigslist: “$35 — elevated mattress-sized space between rooms.” He used a minimalist pitch. “Opening between hall and room available for long/short-term use, accessible by ladder, sheets and pillows not provided.” The ad went up around noon, and by the end of that day, Mr. Freeman had a dozen potential takers.

“I was actually surprised with the amount of places that fall into that category — kind of like ‘I’ll rent a corner,’ ” said Drew Hart, who answered the ad. “I went to look at a place recently in Queens; I wasn’t aware until I got there that it was a cloth shower curtain separating part of the living room.”

. . .

The mattress episode began sometime before dawn on Jan. 16. John Ivanoff, a 22-year-old architecture student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, who shares the 1,500-square-foot apartment on Taaffe Place with five others — the person with the only room with a real window pays an extra $50 in rent — said he and his roommates and Mr. Freeman, a friend, had stayed up drinking and suddenly decided to stuff a spare mattress into the rectangular hole cut into the wall above one bedroom door.

“There were three of us up there at one time,” Mr. Freeman recalled. “All three of us hung out there. After the night was done, I said it would be funny if I put this on a room-share thing on Craigslist and see if anyone responds.”

One who did was Adam Kriney, a 29-year-old experimental jazz drummer “looking for living spaces for under $200, if possible,” as he put it later. He had given up his share in an apartment in Williamsburg and had been staying on various couches of friends.

“Look, I’m looking to live in a crawl space,” said Mr. Kriney, who said he spent his money on rehearsal space. “What do I really need besides my laptop, a sleeping bag and a suitcase?”

The mattress ad caught his eye.

“I kind of thought it was like a cubby cubbyhole where I could hang out,” Mr. Kriney said in an interview. “I didn’t realize it was suspended. Which isn’t a problem. That wouldn’t be a strange thing. It’s just where I lay my head. I’m only here to do my music.”

. . .

An open house for the mattress was scheduled for that Saturday, Jan. 21, between 6 and 9 p.m. Mr. Hart arrived, checked out the real estate and was willing to give it a shot. But, according to Mr. Freeman, the existing inhabitant of the bedroom in question was unenthusiastic. “Pretty much that was the point where it fizzled out,” Mr. Freeman said.