Can not recommend. I write to you today as a woman who hasn’t managed to sleep a full uninterrupted night in this studio.
AirBNB Plus says they “verif[y] through in-person quality inspection to ensure quality and design,” and sure — it looks nice enough, especially in the daytime — but that verifier sure didn’t try to get any sleep here. The place is architecturally interesting but it was not designed to live in, which becomes very obvious very quickly.
You might miss that orange fabric shade next to the bed in the bedroom photos, but pay attention: It’s a perfunctory shade over am interior window. That window was probably very nice when this room was the office it was intended to be. Now, however, it allows the sickly florescent light that illuminates the atrium clock-round — as well as every detail of noise generated by the enormous echo chamber that is the building’s atrium — to enter directly into the bedroom.
That atrium looks cool in the pictures, but all the metal construction amplifies every sound made out there at every hour of the day and night, from people giggling and stumbling in drunk in the wee hours of the morning to the pretty-much-constant shrieking wind that comes howling and clattering across the atrium’s plastic roof.
And that comment about the wind brings me to the sound *inside* the apartment. The tall window looks nice. It is, however, the worst possible window to have in a city this windy. Its design captures the wind perfectly, playing all those panes in their old settings like some horrible instrument, screaming and screeching and rattling past the point that earplugs could possibly do any good, all day and all night in windy conditions — and those tall, tall curtains that look so nice in the photos never quite close, so if you like to sleep past 5am you’d better be ready with that sleep mask. The air conditioner sounds like a jet taking off -- and there’s something tat appears to be a big whole-building exhaust system directly in front of the window that drones on all day and night.
The seating furniture is all finished in plastic, which is not cozy. The couch opposite the blue one has been replaced by a brown plastic bed that extends past the edge of the window towards the center of the room.
Another big problem: The neighborhood. I’ve spent a lot of time in other Cape Town neighborhoods over the years, and I don’t intend to come back to this one. There’s a refugee camp that has moved into Greenmarket Square over the course of the last couple of weeks (Google “Greenmarket Square refugee camp” if you’re curious), and now the area smells like urine and the guys making speeches on the front steps of the church are talking louder and louder about how the SA police are their enemies.
The worst part of all of this is that I asked to change my reservation, giving the host a full paid month of notice. I have never once, in all the years I’ve used AirBNB for my full-time travel, run into a host who had a problem with that great-big notice, especially in high season, which this very much is in Cape Town. Shockingly, this particular host chose to hose me, charging me for a month beyond my departure date — very nearly two grand, for a month of nights I would not be staying in the place. (I’ve been a Superhost myself for years, and I didn’t even know it was *possible* to pull something like that. I certainly never would.) That’s bad news for me, obviously, as I’m out a lot of money, but there’s a lesson here for you, too, dear reader: If you have a problem with one of this host’s properties, you won’t be able to solve it like grown-ups. Prepare to be rinsed for everything you’re worth.