We enjoyed our 8 night stay at Eric’s apartment. We would do rent from Eric again and recommend Eric and the apartment. The photos are representative, except they don’t show the limited storage space. Eric’s apartment is comfortable, spacious and inviting with multiple places to sit in the living room, a king size bed and a big enough bathroom. The smallest part is the kitchen area, but we did not come to cook.
Eric is great to deal with. He is personable and helpful. Eric was responsive and patient prior to our arrival and responded to multiple email exchanges with useful answers and reassurances.
When we met in person, Eric was very friendly, almost as if we had known each other for a while. We clicked right away. Eric speaks English well.. The apartment is conveniently located and provides easy access to the rest of the city, as bus stations and the Metro are close by. If you are a foodie, you might ask Eric to show you where bus station for C3 and C13 is, as those buses go directly to the Halle du Paul Bocuse, an amazing food market, from Hotel d’Ville. Check the Halle’s opening hours, as it is not open all the time.
If you need to do some shopping at a larger store, ask Eric where the Monoprix (supermarket) is located. There are little convenience stores located on either side of Rue des Capucins, but they have limited offerings, but fine for a necessity, or if you don’t want to walk 15 minutes.
We stayed at Eric’s apartment for 8 nights and experienced two Saturday nights. The apartment is on the 5th floor and on a busy street as indicated by other guests. On Saturday, things can get loud, especially as a Creperie ( I enjoyed my Nutella crepe quite a bit when we ate there) just down the street blares music on Saturday afternoon so loudly that we could not avoid hearing the music, even with the windows closed. Unfortunately, we found the music to be mind numbingly boring and repetitive. The music stopped by early evening and things calmed down some. To be centrally located, this is trade off worth making, but something to be aware of. As in most bigger city’s, busy neighborhoods, it can be noisy with traffic and people partying on the weekend, but we kept the windows closed and were able to sleep fine most nights.
Eric’s bed is a king bed, which is great. It is a big harder than we are used to. Eric provides some space in his closet to hang clothes and also has a small fabric, hanging shelf. As the space was quite tight and Eric does not have a chest of drawers, we ended up leaving most of our clothes in the suitcases and also used the little table and chairs in the bedroom for stacking stuff. Again, no big deal and most of our clothes did not need hanging anyway.
Eric will explain that his apartment is in an older building that does not allow AC. His bedroom has darkening curtains and they work well to keep the morning light out. We slept with the windows close, due to the street noise and it was ok in late May. The living room and kitchen do not have curtains and it gets very bright and warm. As his apartment is on the fifth floor, no one can look into the apartment, except a cat or two that might be meandering on the roof of the building across from the apartment.
As in many older buildings, the toilet is sensitive and cannot handle anything except human waste and toilet paper. It has a crusher that comes on whenever water gets used. The shower was a good size and the water pressure great. We liked the rain shower head! Having two, if small, sinks was helpful.
We had some problems with the downstairs, main entrance door in that the chip system malfunctioned. Luckily, we did not get locked out for long, but that was a bit nerve wrecking, as it happened to us at night and we had no way of getting into the building and Eric was unavailable. As this apparently happens at times, Eric said it would be ok to ring someone else’s door bell to get them to buzz the door open, or wait for someone to leave the building.
Eric has a washing machine which we used on three occasions during our 8 day stay. We air dried the clothes on a drying rack in the living room and that worked out well. As we had a Hippocket wifi, we did not used Eric’s wifi most of the time, but it seem to work well, as far as I could tell. We did not have any problem with the wifi in any of the rooms.
We did not cook any meals, but ate breakfast every day at the little table in the living room. Eric even provided some condiments which came in very handy. The kitchen has egg cups for those of us who enjoy a soft boiled egg in the morning. Thank you, Eric!
The apartment was clean enough, but could have been cleaner for my liking. I gave it a 4 star rating which is even a bit generous, as it could benefit from more detailed attention.
We wish the next guests as good as a time as we had!
Merci Beaucoup, Eric!