Banker’s £100k payout ... over noisy children in the f lat above
A CITY trader who sued her neighbours for the ‘intolerable’ noise made by their children playing has won more than £100,000 in damages.
Sarvenaz Fouladi claimed she was often late for her job as a hedge fund trader because she was kept up at night by the racket coming from Ahmed and Sarah El Kerrami’s flat above hers.
Miss Fouladi, who is single and lives with her mother, said the couple’s three young children used their luxury home ‘like a playground’ and there were ‘kids running and dropping things for seven hours non-stop’.
She kept a log that noted noises such as ‘a child’s voice’, ‘dragging toys on floor’, ‘chair pulled’ and ‘someone tapping on kitchen side deliberately’.
Miss Fouladi, 38, who sued Mr and Mrs El Kerrami for ‘noise nuisance’, also claimed the tranquillity of her £2.6million sixth-floor apartment in Kensington, west London, was shattered by late-night parties held by the couple. Judge Nicholas Parfitt said it was the noise of simple ‘day-to-day living’ which had caused the problems in the mansion block, but the El Kerramis and the family company that owns their flat should have put carpets on the wooden floors in living areas.
When the flooring was replaced before they moved in, nothing had been done to limit noise transmission between the flats, the judge said. The impact of the noise was ‘sufficiently loud to be invasive and disturbing’.
During the case, Miss Fouladi told Central London County Court that she had lived happily in St Mary Abbots Court – a 1920s block with 24-hour porters – for years without noise from above until the El Kerramis moved into their seventh-floor flat in 2010. It was then that her life and that of her mother, Fereshent Salamat, 66, began to be blighted, she claimed.
Miss Fouladi said: ‘I just want to live my life in peace. It’s my home. It’s where people go for peace and quiet. The noises that come down are intolerable.’
The El Kerramis’ barrister, Gordon Wignall, accused Miss Fouladi of being ‘hypersensitive’ to the activity of a normal family.
Judge Parfitt rejected any suggestion that the El Kerramis had created noise deliberately to annoy Miss Fouladi. He also said the noise diary she kept was ‘exaggerated’ in places.
However, Kensington and Chelsea Council officers had visited and heard excessive and disturbing noise at times, he said. ‘I conclude that everyday noises of the type described by the officers could be heard to a disturbing level ... and such noises, even at midnight for example, could include children playing,’ he said.
The judge accepted Miss Fouladi’s claim that the El Kerramis and the company had caused her ‘noise nuisance’.
He said the lease was breached by the installation of new floors in the El Kerramis’ flat without authorisation and by the failure to use carpets in living areas.
He issued an injunction, ordering the company to do work on the floors in the flat to cut noise levels significantly.
He also ordered that Miss Fouladi be paid compensation of £107,397, rising by £40 a day until the work is done.
The judge rejected claims of nuisance and breach of contract made against the freeholder of the block, St Mary Abbots Court Limited. The El Kerrami family and both companies had denied all Miss Fouladi’s claims.
‘I just want to live in peace’