True to all the other reviewers, the apartment is REALLY well decorated and aesthetically pleasing, so I'll be approaching my review from a functional standpoint because we can all agree that the apartment is beautiful.
The apartment advertises as two bedrooms however the second bedroom isn't really a functional bedroom.
By that I mean there is absolutely NO privacy, two of the four walls are glass sliding doors that anyone can look through and see through. It's not a functional bedroom in that there are no end tables or upright stands for you to put your non-clothing belongings on (there is a closet) - you end up just putting your things on the floor.
The main furniture in the 2nd bedroom is a bed that takes up 90% of the room - the only light in the room is a floor lamp which is controlled by a switch on the OUTSIDE of the bedroom.
As I mentioned one of the doors into the bedroom is a sliding glass door, the other is a solid wood sliding door. Neither of these doors slide open enough to give the room any actual space and so you're constantly having to either walk across the bed to get from one side of the room to the other or squeeze your body around the corners of the bed to get from one side of the room to the other.
Not what I expected at all but you should know this before you go.
The living room tv offers Netflix and Hulu and other streaming services which we did use and all of that worked just fine, thank you for that!!
The bathrooms were fine and worked well, no issues, hot water felt great.
Minor points would be that the shower heads could be replaced. It seems odd that the whole apartment was clearly designed but it seems like the bathrooms were left out?
The shower heads were standard apartment / dormitory showerheads...the ones that blast out of the wall with no real controls or handles.
Again just a minor point but it would def complete the vibe of apartment.
The kitchen and functional use of the kitchen was fine, no issues other than it didn't have any paper towels which I found odd. It forced us to be wasteful with the kitchen towels but maybe that's not a big deal.
As for the host - There are host and then there are admins that run building properties. Jess is not a host.
Jess wanted us to time our arrival such that we let her know when we were exactly 30 minutes away from the apt and kept pestering me to see where I was.
I found this odd because if check-in is after 3, all you need to do is provide the check-in instructions like EVERYONE ELSE DOES as opposed to constantly pestering the guests on when they will arrive.
The other thing about Jess is that once we did inform her we were 30 minutes out, when she provided the check-in instructions she had a long note in there indicating that previous guests had triggered a series of noise complaints and if the building received another noise complaint, WE would be kicked out and would lose our security....as if we were the ones responsible for the initial noise complaints.
Turns out threatening to lose our security deposit was something Jess lorded over us the ENTIRE stay.
Everything was, do this or you won't get your security deposit, be sure you don't do that or you will lose your security deposit.
It's understandable to make us aware about certain restrictions, but to constantly be holding that in front of us dangling it like a carrot, I mean keep the damn security deposit if it'll get you to leave us alone.
I finally responded to her asking how much the security deposit is and why was she constantly threatening that we would lose it?!! She replied that the messages are automatically scheduled to be sent out at certain times and she didn't mean it to come across the way it did, etc etc....
As I said, there are host and then there are building admins.
The apartment is in a great location and about a 5-minute drive from the Billy Bishop airport downtown, however I would not stay here again and if you have other options I think you should look elsewhere too.