Pros and Cons of renting this property
Pros - hard to find a 5 bedroom in London and this house has 4 bedroom en suite so good for large groups. The location is short walk to Paddington Station so great for jumping on tube to sightsee and one of the double decker tour companies has a stop right nearby. Large variety of restaurants and pubs in the area. The house sits on a Mews or alley so little traffic noise. Check out the area called Little Venice that sits behind Paddington Station.
Cons - this is managed by a company not an individual. All the emails before we arrived come from Kimberely. Then we got there and we found out that Stay Beyond was managing the house and the cell phone "Kimberely" gave me was for Stay Beyond. Usually not a problem but I have never had to communicate so much to get the basics. For example, none of the showers (5 of them) had soap. According to Stay Beyond, they were changing their soap brand, but they didn't bother to tell us to bring our own or provide an alternate option. We had to buy our own at the corner store. This may sound minor, but we had to ask for toilet paper as only 1 extra roll was left in each bathroom for a 5 day rental. There were no extra pillows so had to ask for 1 more. There was 1 fan in the house and we had to ask for more as well. There was a heat wave in London that had already been going on for 2 weeks. Stay Beyond kept making excuses mostly that they had to buy new ones for us. After 2 days, the cleaning staff arrive with 2 old fans and 1 new one. Basically, we got these items if we managed to run into the cleaning staff while they were working on another property.
We rent houses/apartments a couple times a year and I have never had to communicate so much with the host, especially about basic items. Usually we only reach out if something missing or not working. For the cost of this house, it was disappointing that we had to reach out daily for items that are usually included with the rental.