I booked a one month stay in this unit and have mixed reviews, so here are my thoughts. This unit is on the 3rd (aka 4th) floor (65 steps to the apartment), has one BR/hall BA on the first level and a loft area upstairs with one bed & small BA.
Pros: centrally located in the city center, between Sao Bento station and the Ribiera. Comfortable beds. Wall heaters in each BR and one in the LR. European sized fridge. Hand soap, laundry & dish detergent provided. Modern wall hair dryers in each bathroom. Fast internet.
Cons: NOISE: Extremely loud pedestrian street (street musicians/performers start daily around 10am and go until 10pm-midnight most nights). Sounds crazy, but there are swarms of screaming seagulls at all hours (the noise is especially worse in the upstairs room/close to the roof). Property is also close to garbage receptacles on the street, so the regular dumping of glass bottles can be loud. I live in an urban area, so I know noise is to be expected to an extent, but just keep it in mind if sensitive to noise.
The kitchen has 2 wooden spoons, a few cutting knives, a corkscrew & basic cutlery. There were no real cooking utensils (we had to purchase a spatula to cook breakfast).
There is what could be a fabulous wardrobe in the entry hall, but every drawer is broken & unusable and the rest of the space is crammed with items for storage (a foldout cot, random floor rugs, mop/broom/bucket, ironing board (but no iron….took me 12 days to get an iron delivered). Other than this wardrobe, there is no other place to hang clothes (upstairs or downstairs).
Electricity is easily overwhelmed (in order to use the hair dryer, all heaters had to be turned off—we learned this the hard way at 10:30pm our first night). Hot water doesn’t last long (we were 2 people and had to stagger showers).
Communication with Homing was hit & miss. On day one, we discovered they had only left 2 towels. They responded quickly, left some additional towels and a nice bottle of wine the same day. When the power failed on us, I called the local Airbnb co-host who walked us through how to reset the breaker box. On the flip side, I was almost halfway through my stay before I got an iron. I never received any check out instructions or communication, even after I messaged them to ask what the process was. We left on an early morning train, dropped the keys in the mailbox slot in the lobby, & hoped for the best.
Overall, this unit provides the basics and was fairly comfortable. A little attention to detail however (hanging racks in the bedrooms, a towel bar or hook in the upstairs bath, adding some basic cooking utensils, repairing the upstairs shower door panel, providing coffee pods that actually fit the machine, making the hall wardrobe a usable space for guests) would make the biggest difference in a guest’s stay.