We are a family of 4 that spent 9 days in Tom's apartment.
The place has many strong points but also many weak points that could be made better and be improved in the future.
The communication with Tom's team was ok but still, this place is being managed remotely and this has its implications.
To begin with, we were asked to get the apartment keys from a place that is a 10 minute walk from the apartment. We did not like this at all, and found it to be very inconvenient.
Next, we found many things broken or not working in the apartment, such as a water tap in the main bedroom's shower, many lights all over the place were out of order, and the corridor's toilet ventilation didn't work. We sent a message reporting it all and received a reply that offered to send someone over the next morning. They asked to send this person without the presence of anyone from "Tom's team" to be there to watch and to supervise. We had to refuse this solution as we didn't like the idea of strangers hanging around in the apartment while we were not there. None of the issues we reported were fixed during our entire stay.
In another case we asked for another pair of keys (we received just one pair). They were surprised by this request so we needed to explain the obvious that having just one pair of keys does not allow us as a family to enjoy our planned separate attractions. They said they will look into it and never returned to us during our entire stay.
The location of the apartment is really very good, very central, a few minutes' walk to several tube stations, restaurants & cafes, supermarket, and close to Oxford street, etc.
The apartment is spacious, with a large living room, comfy sofa, well equipped kitchen, 2 bathrooms, 2 bed rooms and separate beds for the kids which is a big plus.
However there is no air-conditioning! During our stay in August the average temperatures in London was 33 degrees Celsius the whole week we were there and it was very hot in the apartment. Some nights all of us really suffered from the heat.
The next very problematic matter that we found extremely disturbing and annoying is the fact that any tap water that you turn on (including flushing the toilet) activates a noisy pump that is located in a cabin in the master bedroom's shower.
At night time this noise was so loud, it literally woke us up every time it started.
There is a note saying you can turn it off if you wish, however then you can't flush the toilet nor wash your hands… so this solution doesn't really help.
Corridor's shower - no matter what we tried we couldn't use it as we couldn't adjust the hot/cold water to a level that we didn't get burned.
Corridor's toilet – doesn't flush well, you are advised to use a wooden stick to help you pressing the button all the way through, even when doing so it didn't flush well.
Master bedroom shower - has 2 shower heads, both are narrow shape that squirt all over the place, not enjoyable - we didn't like it. As was mentioned earlier, the water tap of the upper shower head got broken on the second day we were there and we couldn't really use it.
Toilet paper - when you're hosting a family of 4 people for 10 days, you can show some generosity and spare more than 2 roles per bathroom… FYI Tom's team.
The Kitchen – although it is well equipped and clean, the one time that we wanted to cook something simple for the kids, we found 2 filthy pans (that we needed to wash thoroughly), one of them needed to be thrown in the garbage a long time ago, as it was dangerously old and scratched. We also couldn't find any Pasta strainer which we think is a basic request for any kitchen.
The children’s bedroom - the window can be opened just a bit because it gets stopped by the bed head buttress. As mentioned earlier, it was very hot in the apartment during our stay and this was very problematic. The window shade was missing its chain so we needed to climb up and roll it down and up by hand. The carpet got folded whenever we opened the door and stayed this way which caused us to stumble over it (especially at night).
Master bedroom – the bed is, I believe, king size and relatively comfy, yet there is a very weird mattresses combination there, 2 single mattresses one next to another which are not the same height. To compensate for that, a thin mattress was added to get them leveled. On top of that, another "queen" size thin mattress was added to cover the two single mattresses below but this just doesn't cover them fully, it is short about 20 cm from each side. Well, to us this seemed a very awkward arrangement for an apartment at this price level.
People mentioned the apartment is located in a quiet side street. We found it not to be so quite when you need to sleep with the windows open. It turned out to be very noisy. There is a restaurant nearby with a lot of noise coming from there, noise from big motorcycles, noise from garbage trucks that stop next to the restaurant every night at 2 am, and more.
To summarize, there were too many things that bothered us in the apartment during our stay and I'm really sorry to say that we felt it was not a good value for our money.