The Good:
1. Very clean. I mean spotless!
2. The beds are very comfortable.
3. Location is excellent (for those who want to stay near Taksim Square and are visiting mostly for shopping)
4. Home very well equipped (with one important exception; see below).
5. Very nicely designed home.
6. Very welcoming host.
The Bad:
1. The posting indicates there is a laundry dryer but the house does not have one! (it does have a washer, but with humidity, hanging laundry in direct sunlight in the sunroom was not enough to dry them completely!) I let the host and their assistant know that I was expecting a laundry dryer, but no alternative or discount was offered to account for this problem.
2. The posting did not mention this important fact: the home is a 5 story building. (1 master bedroom on the 2nd floor; 1 master bedroom on the 3rd floor; 1 bedroom and a bathroom and 2 balconies on the 4th floor; and the kitchen and a sunroom on the 5th floor.) This is the type of information people like to know before booking a stay.
3. The light in one bedroom was constantly flickering and I alerted the host and their assistant about it on day one. Also, the light in the kitchen went out on the 2nd night and I alerted the host and their assistant about it. The host’s assistant asked me try to fix the light bulb by “turning” and “squeezing” the light bulb. That did not work and it was not easy to coordinate with them to have someone come replace the light bulbs. Communication and responsiveness could be improved. We used our phone flashlights in the kitchen and one bedroom for most of the stay.
4. Most things in the home are flimsy and May break at any time (lose screws coming off bathroom appliances …etc). You have to be very careful.
5. The alarm system at the entrance of the home was going off constantly. It was not fixed. The host asked me to press two buttons which solved the noise problem temporarily … and then it started after a few hours.
The Ugly:
A random woman came into the house at 10:30 am which is 3.5 hours before the check out time! She apparently had the key and started talking to me in Turkish which I did not understand. I told her that my check out time is at 2 pm, then she left. This violation of privacy is not cool. In the ad., the host set check out time to 2 pm and they should have stuck with it.