What we really liked about the apartment:
The location is amazing. It's right on one of the best streets in El Born, with excellent bars, restaurants, and shopping nearby. The bed is also very comfortable with plenty of pillows, and the A/C is a lifesaver. The rooftop terrace is also awesome! We enjoyed a bottle of wine provided by our hosts up there on our last night in town and it was a fantastic way to cap off our stay in Barcelona. The walls are also super thick and if you have earplugs you won't hear any noise from the street while you're sleeping. We also had a very pleasant check-in experience with one of the people who work for the hosting company.
However, we also ran into a few big issues during our stay:
The bathroom is awful. Like, really, really bad. The wall is made of transparent glass blocks, meaning that you can literally see (and hear) everything going on when someone is in the bathroom, which can be...awkward. You can also smell sewer gas coming out of the bathroom every time one of your neighbors uses their toilet. You can also hear your neighbors using their toilet. To compound the problem, the bathroom fan does not work. The walk-in shower also has a problem where the space is so small, water leaks out of the stall and you have to keep a towel on the floor, which also creates quite a bit of black mold along the edges of the floor and walls. This ended up being a fairly big problem, because we were only provided with 2 large towels and 2 small towels for a 4 night stay. By day 3, the 2 small towels ended up being waterlogged from the shower, and the big towels were moldy smelling from no working fan. When we reached out to the host, they told us that extra towels were $10 each. This interaction was actually really off-putting to us. For nearly $300 a night, we could have went to a really nice hotel a block away instead.
There were also a couple of smaller issues during our stay. One being that the iron doesn't really work and ends up spilling water everywhere. Also, every single time your neighbors come and go, they have to slam the entry door to close it, and it will sound like a bomb went off.
I really don't like leaving poor reviews, and I try to find the positives. Usually places like this will have enough charm to overcome its eccentricities. Unfortunately, not this place.