It's difficult to write a not positive review when the house is so nice, the holiday was a joy and you know this is going to go straight to the people who own the apartment, as opposed to some faceless corporation.
Let's start with the positives: the house is genuinely as gorgeous as it looks in the photos. Very well decorated, vintage style, the location could not be more ideal. We walked in and I instantly texted Mariana to tell her how much we loved it. But there were a few things that straight off the bat made it a not 5 stars stay: we arrived about an hour after we said we would (still well before 8pm) due to a trains strike that forced us to find a coach to travel into Portugal instead, which meant that we had to self check in. That was easy enough, but it was a pity not meeting with Feliciano or his sister. (In the Airbnb we had just checked out of, the hosts had welcomed us personally, given us a little map of Porto, told us about the area, gave recommendations as to where to eat for the evening, gifted us a basket of wine and presunto... all these things just gave that little extra care that I think would define a 5 stars stay).
Anyway, we tried to connect to the Wifi and realised there's no signal in the living room/bathroom. The router was in the bedroom, which is were the signal was the strongest. The apartment being so small all things considered, you'd think you can get signal everywhere in the house, but that was not the case. We knew there would be no shower or bidet, but one evening when my boyfriend tried to have a bath, half of the water drained out of the tub before he could even go in, so even the bath wasn't a full option. The bedroom regrettably does not have an aircon, which would not have been an issue for me overall had we been able to keep the windows open at night (in May, it's still cool at night), but we couldn't do that unless we also kept the blinds wide open, which let all the light in -- as well as mosquitoes, despite our attempts to use the net curtains to prevent that. We tried using the fan to cool the room down, but every morning we'd wake up with throats dried and nose congested. The sleep was overall very poor, and one night we even booked a hotel room near by so that we could reset a little with a full night of sleep. Also worth mentioning that bed is a sofa bed. There is a record player which we thought to put to use one evening, but couldn't put any CDs in, so we didn't. The extraction fan over the hobs was dusty and very dirty inside, so I did not use it when cooking so to prevent anything from falling into the pot. And finally, and I'm so sorry to put this on the public review despite having said it already in the private message to Feliciano, we found a cockroach in the living room one evening, and another walking into the building. This is undoubtably because the building is old and so central, but from that moment on it was very stressful to go around the apartment barefoot and avoided it as much as possible.
In conclusion, if I returned to Lisbon (which I am looking forward to doing, as the city was incredible) I would for sure not book here again. But the house was immensely pretty, and Mariana and Feliciano punctual and helpful via text.