The apartment has been newly redone. It has high end appliances, a nice bathroom, good wifi, a comfortable bed, was in a convenient part of DC for our purposes, and is a short couple blocks from a Whole Foods. The team managing the apartment was very communicative and very responsive. Easy check-in, check-out, etc.
So, why only a 4 rating?
The apartment is on a somewhat busy street (which was a disappointment as we thought it was on a more shaded side street, but AirBnB is always a gamble on location) . The living room window, which is large, looks out on all the trash cans from the multi-tenant building. I propped a pillow in the window to at least partially obscure the view of the trash cans. The bedroom windows look out on a closed in building interior and weren't really useable. The apartment had no wine glasses, lamps (literally no lamps), bed side tables, or cable functionality (it appeared to have the most basic cable package - we couldn't even get the usual free movie stations like TNT). Oddly, the bar stools all descend to below bar height when sat upon (the lock mechanism to keep them at a given height didn't seem to work)
I have to reiterate, that the management team was very responsive and (by next day of request) brought us a couple wine glasses, a lamp, bed side table and a roku stick. All of the things I mentioned can be easily addressed. As I went back to the prior reviews, I see now that some of these same things were mentioned by others.
It was just disappointing that these small factors weren't thought of beforehand and that we had to continually request such things that we would have thought to be standard and expected in an AirBnB of this price and caliber. I would probably stay here again, but would confirm that these things were addressed.
Hence the 4 rating.