My colleague and I thoroughly enjoyed our stay at Cecile’s place. We only needed the place for a couple of nights before moving to our conference hotel in downtown Paris when we were in Paris in the fall of 2017. We wanted a ‘different’ place in a different area of Paris (south from the center) as a base to re-discover Paris, where both of us have been a dozen of times, and that’s exactly what we got.
The first thing you need to recognize if you are looking at the map of the area is that it’s not an apartment. It’s a town house (i.e. Reihenhaus in German). In other words, it’s a part of a settlement that was built (very likely) over a hundred years ago where every door belongs to a separate family house. So you’ll get to experience and enjoy how some of these Paris families lived decades if not over a century ago. I’m sure it’s worth something. And this was the source of the charm that Cecile’s place held for us, besides the charm of the area in general, such as pedestrian access to the Parc Montsouris and Cité Universitaire.
Secondly, if you are looking for an area with drinking dives, it may not necessarily be the right neighborhood for you, but once you walk all the way from Cecile’s place to the Place de la Commune de Paris, you’ll run into Soyouz and Sputnik bars (where the personnel is way friendlier than anywhere else in Paris, particularly if you speak Russian or Serbian, as we do besides German and English), as well as lots of other bars where you’ll enjoy an alternative to the downtown Paris nightlife, i.e. a lot more relaxed and cheaper.
Admittedly, you need to know what to expect in a place like this: toilet and shower cabin in the basement, bedrooms on the first floor with a staircase to the attic blocking the last steps on the stairs to the first floor. But on balance, given the location of Cecile’s place, the small garden/patio space in front of her town house, the charm of the immediate neighborhood, which looks like and is a separate settlement, her place will give you a different feel for Paris.
Besides, communicating with Cecile was very easy: we had told her we would arrive around midnight and she was there to meet us. Similarly, she was there on time to pick up the keys from us when we were leaving. By way of an additional note, if you don’t speak French, communicating with Cecile in English or German is very easy. German is her forte which was very convenient for us, as both of us live in Austria and we are used to communicating in German. Having a German-speaking counterparty in Paris felt very easy for us.