The Stafford St flat has 13 residents. Sam Terry is third from left in this picture.

Sam Terry, a fourth-year computer science student at Otago University, lives in a 13-man flat in Stafford St, Dunedin. The house, built in 1885, has gained fame as the site of the annual Staffathon, an all-day Sunday soiree which this year drew about 400 punters. Most of the flatmates are in their fifth years at university.

SAM: This is our first year living in this house. There are 13 guys in the flat. A few of us went to the halls together in first year and others just met over the years. I'd flatted with a couple of people I'm living with now. We're kind of three groups of flats that have come together to form one.

The house is three storeys, and we live on the top two. The top floor has two bathrooms, the kitchen and bedrooms, and the downstairs has bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen as well. No one shares a room.

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Someone told me it used to be a nunnery back in the day. I'm not too sure about that.

I think a couple of the fellas that came to move into this flat had come from pretty big flats the previous years. I'd heard a couple of the dramas… but it's been pretty good. I guess it's pretty easy with a whole bunch of dudes. No dramas or anything, really.

Flat meals are the best way to go. The upstairs boys – one person cooks each night, and the same thing with the guys downstairs.

A lot of us hang out in the lounge. On the top floor, it's quite cool because we've got a living room and then we've got a big, huge foyer bit. If we have parties, we normally hang out there. A lot of the times, we find the top floor guys in our living room. Downstairs, we've got a band room. One of the guys plays guitar.

We had the Staffathon last week. I went to that last year and I think that's another thing that made me pretty keen to come to this flat – and I think a couple of the other boys as well – to host that.

We had bouncers and Portaloos and stuff like that. It was a big event. The living room was packed, all the rooms were packed. We had two bands playing downstairs, a DJ playing upstairs. We started at 9am.

Uni's a bit of a trek. When we signed the flat, the real estate guy we went through gave us two scooters to help with the commute. And a few of the boys have cars – we'll carpool into uni in the morning and come back in the afternoon. It's probably about a half-hour walk.

I'm half American. I came over from America to come to uni here. Schools back in America are quite expensive. And it was a cool experience to come over here. My brother, who's Kiwi, went to uni here. He was like: "Oh, check out Otago. It's pretty cool."

So I hopped on a plane, checked it out. It is pretty cool.