If you want to live like Kurt Cobain but don’t have the spare $400,000 to buy his Washington childhood home, you’re in luck. An LA apartment that the Nirvana frontman shared with Courtney Love a few years before he died has been listed on short-term rental website Airbnb, at the price of about £760 ($1,140) per week or £200 a night.
Cobain and Love lived in the Fairfax flat from 1991 to 1992, during the height of Nirvana’s fame – according to the apartment’s current tenant Brandon Kleinman, Cobain worked on paintings and song lyrics while living in the property.
“The day I signed the lease, I was sitting with the landlord, and as soon as I signed on the dotted line, he said: ‘Okay, now I can tell you the real story behind this apartment,’” Kleinman said to pop culture website Vulture. “He kept it a secret because he wasn’t getting great tenants when he advertised the apartment’s backstory. He went on to tell me about what it was like having Kurt Cobain live here, and what to watch for.”
The apartment has been spruced up considerably since the days of Cobain and Love’s tenancy. According to Vulture, a plumbing leak is believed to have driven Cobain and Love out of the apartment, after water destroyed guitars, artwork and journals that Cobain kept in the bathtub. Any potential Airbnb renters need not worry: Kleinman told Vulture the plumbing has since been fixed.
Pictures taken in the apartment surfaced online in March last year, and displayed a messy and starkly furnished home littered with rubbish. A photograph accompanying the rental listing, and captioned as one taken in the bedroom now up for rent, shows Cobain sitting on a bed in a room with graffiti written on the walls. Matador Records co-owner Gerard Cosloy’s name is one of a few clearly visible words scrawled directly onto the wall.
The apartment typically gets rented out about four to five times per year, according to Kleinman. Predictably, most of those interested are Nirvana fans.
The listing has made the news in the weeks before intimate Cobain biopic Montage of Heck is due to premiere on HBO in the US on 4 May. The film was released in UK cinemas on Friday 10 April.
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