If you want REAL Paris, book this apartment NOW. We stayed 10 days over Christmas and we feel that we could have stayed 10 years! Where to start - the apartment is in an older building so the floors are a bit wonky, but the important parts are beautifully updated: fantastic shower with great water pressure and instant hot water, clothes washer, great oven and stove, very welcome Nespresso machine, nice big fridge and freezer, and a dishwasher! The bathroom and kitchen are tiny, but extremely well-equipped and modern, and it’s Paris, where apartments are small! Windows are very new and very nice. ATM just outside the building door with two others across the street. Excellent cafes just a few doors away, and one of the best boulangeries in Paris literally across the street! A lovely church a couple doors down - we attended mass on Christmas Eve and felt very comfortable and welcome. Supermarkets only a short walk away, as well as pharmacies, butcher, cheese shop, florist, fish market, tarte shop - can you tell we ate well?! And if all of this isn’t enough, the entrance to the metro is literally steps away, with another metro line within a few minutes walk. You can use the ticket machine to buy a single ticket or a “carnet” of 10 tickets (at a small discount) and then you are away! You can get literally anywhere in the city (and out of it) from this station. Get the RATP metro app and it will route you anywhere you want to go, including all the details you need to get to your destination. Be advised that this metro station has over 100 steps, so take the elevator - you’ll see it after you go through the ticket turnstile. To have metro access so very close is perhaps the very best thing about an already marvelous apartment.
Sacré Coeur is just outside the living room window and La Tour Eiffel is outside the dining room window. Go onto the small balcony to watch the street below and listen to the sound of people laughing and talking as they go about their day or the sound of scooters on the cobblestone street, or the sound of the bell from the church just a few doors down. Open the dining room window and listen to the distant sound of traffic as you watch the Tower sparkle on the hour. Then look at all of it again, so that you never forget.
The bed is comfortable with a down duvet, plenty of towels and pillows, kitchen has lots of cookware with lots of glassware, cutlery, and dishware in other cupboards. The dishwasher is fantastic and runs a full cycle in only 90 minutes! Dining room is quite small with table and chairs, but really who cares about a tiny dining room with the sparkling Eiffel Tower just outside the window! Living room is comfortable and spacious - TV is Internet-based with mostly French channels, but you can also watch YouTube, and we found BBC and Sky News, and also you can log into your Netflix, Disney+, or Prime (some things are not available while in France, but do you really want to watch that much TV when the best of Paris is just right there?).
Ismail is a perfect host - he met us exactly as arranged, and checked in with us throughout our stay. He even put a Christmas tree in the apartment for us - a generous and amazing surprise! We had a couple questions during our stay and he was always quick to respond.
We would stay here again without hesitation! If you want pristine, pre-packaged, tour group stuff, go elsewhere, but if you want to feel like a real Parisien for a few days, absolutely book here!