In the house's current state, I do not recommend this place. The only positive was the check in process with the owner meeting us and guiding us to the property.
We had booked to stay here 10 days and ended up staying 1 night and leaving the next morning. We have never had this issue anywhere else we have ever stayed, and never had to leave somewhere we had booked.
There is a long list of problems with the property which hit us as soon as we entered.
1- Cleanliness- The house was dirty and had clearly not been cleaned properly for a while. The floors were dirty, my toddler wiped the floor with a wet wipe and it came up dirty on both the stone flooring and the kitchen porcelain tiles. The bed heads were dirty and stained, the walls were dirty, the blinds were frayed at the edges dirty/mouldy and had dead mosquitos on them. We found dead bugs throughout the house.
2- Kitchen utensils- All the pots and pans were dirty. The frying pans were unusable, scratched and damaged. Do not expect to come here and be able to cook.
3- Travel cots- We requested two for our toddler and baby, they were both dirty. One had a sheet over the end which was covering that the end material of the cot was broken. The owner said this was not a problem and as it was the foot of the cot put it against a wall. There is no such thing as the foot of a travel cot, and as all toddlers move a lot in their sleep is very dangerous. Even taking the owners advice and placing against a wall, they could have fallen out and become wedged between the cot and wall. Our toddler could have fallen out of it in the night or got wrapped up in the sheet. This was disturbing for us and dangerous.
4- Damp- as soon as we entered the house it smelt musty and damp. We later found damp throughout the house.
5- Listing not accurate- The pictures were clearly taken a long time ago and not reflective of the house's current state.
We were advised by the owner that the reason we weren't happy was because the 'Villa is a typical country house, with all its strengths and weaknesses!' and also to 'consider that you have chosen to rent a house!'. We have stayed in many country houses previously, and had booked this for that exact reason. This house is in it's current state due to neglect, not because of it's location.
The owner offered to 'send the cleaning lady', buy new pans and just remove the blind (with no replacement). The issues with this house go well beyond these 'quick fix's'.
This house has a great garden and could be a lovely property, as the listing pictures suggest. However, it has clearly been left not properly looked after since the listing pictures were taken some years ago.
The owner did offer us one of his other properties to stay at instead but after seeing how they approach upkeep and standards we did not want to take the risk of having the same issues.
Finally, on deciding to leave, the owner took the stance of 'Obviously a full refund is not possible, there will be the costs of the night, and the costs of initial and final preparation'. As there was clearly no or at least an extremely poor initial preparation, and no final preparation to do, this was extremely unfair.
Thankfully AirBnB were superb and on a lengthy conversation over the phone, intervened. Thank you AirBnB.