The apartment is beautiful and well located, overlooking Centre Pompidou, with easy access to Gare du nord. The bustling area guarantees availability of food, drink, and entertainment (including a busker who whistles incessantly like a bird—and yes, that’s entertainment).

On the day of our arrival, Frédérick was not able to meet up until 19h. We stowed our baggage at CityLocker-Marais for €15.
Frédérick was friendly and requisitely contrite for being late when we met, and gave a detailed tour of the apartment with instructions on where to leave our shoes, how to use lights, how to operate windows, how to protect surfaces of marble furniture with placemats, how to use the glass squeegee, etc. It was a masterful mix of helpful and infantilizing.

Our lovely stay was bookended by two unfortunate and inter-related incidents.

The electricity went off within an hour of our arrival. Frédérick asked us if we had plugged in anything (we hadn’t--we wouldn’t have dared!) and gave us instructions over the phone (with tones of contrition) for fixing the breaker. Alas, his solution—flipping the switch to “on”—didn’t work. Although Frédérick didn’t explicitly forbid it in his introductory tour, we didn’t experiment with the packet of fuses available, as none of us are useful people.

Alas, in the city of light, we had none.

Frédérick didn’t come out until mid-morning on the second day, so we weren’t able to cook or keep perishable foods. (Future guests: Don’t eat the food in the freezer.) He deduced that an individual fuse had blown and took it out without fixing the underlying problem. This makeshift solution gave us electricity, but left us with an exquisite mystery: what, in the apartment, is now dysfunctional?
The answer, luckily, came without much investigative effort on our part; the faulty fuse was for the water boiler! So, no showering for us for the rest of the trip. (Future guests: In the absence of a warm shower, one of the towels was used for body-flossing—can you guess which one?)

NB:

1)The apartment is heaven for anyone of style who has ever dreamt of reclining on Le Corbusier furniture. However, style does not meet function here. For non-able-bodied travellers (or just clumsy ones—like someone in our party), the stairs may be treacherous. It’s winding, uneven, narrow, with pictures hung on one side (in lieu of a bannister), and the steps are painted inexplicably in a beautiful, glossy (and hence wondrously slippery) finish.

2)More serious than the killer staircase: Not advertised is an optional €50 cleaning fee, which you only learn about after booking. If you don’t take the cleaners, you’re responsible for cleaning everything, including your fingerprints off the glass table top (seriously). Given how gross we were and how much grease we were leaving behind with our bodies, we were glad we paid the fee.

Paris was lovely as usual, but the accommodations left us somewhat disappointed and very pungent—lucky that we like French chèvres!