A naturist couple who spent more than £100,000 improving their nudist colony chalet have fought off their landlord’s bid to evict them after the Court of Appeal found that they had the benefit of an assured tenancy, protected under the Housing Act 1988.
The couple had occupied the chalet in the midst of a 12-acre naturist village for more than 20 years. They bought it for the then princely sum of £36,000 and had since spent heavily on beautifying it. However, they incurred the wrath of their landlord when they virtually rebuilt the property, clothing it in rendered breeze blocks.
The landlord objected that they had replaced the essentially wooden chalet with a more permanent structure and launched possession proceedings on the basis that they were no more than unprotected common law tenants of the plot on which the property stood. That argument, however, did not persuade a judge, who found that the couple occupied the chalet under an assured tenancy.
In dismissing the landlord’s appeal, the Court noted that the chalet, both in its current guise and as originally constructed, could only be moved by dismantling it into its constituent parts. The chalet, which had long been lawfully occupied as a separate dwelling house, was therefore ‘part of the land’. In those circumstances, the landlord’s possession claim had rightly been rejected.