Manolo is very welcoming and happy to provide local information and eating recommendations to suit your needs.
The studio is in a perfect location in that it's only a 5 minute walk down the road to all the excellent restaurants, boutiques and shops in Paia. Studio is spacious and reasonably well equipped. We stayed for 5 nights and had no intention of cooking dinner as we ate in restaurants in Paia every evening, however if you intended to cook dinner the range of equipment is limited to a portable two ring hob and a small grill. There was no hair dryer in the studio.
The soundproofing in the building is poor in that we could here Manolo and family talking in their accommodation above the studio. There is also traffic noise from the very busy road outside - this noise starts at around 6am and goes on till around midnight making getting off to sleep difficult and then you are woken up early in the morning.
When we checked into the studio we noticed a very strong chemical odour which was particularly bad in the bathroom. My wife suffers from asthma and this odour aggravated it to the extent that she neded to use her inhaler frequently whilst in the studio. We kept the windows open in both main room and bathroom as much as possible ( traffic noise meant you could not leave them open during night) to ventilate the room and after a couple of days the odour had dispersed a bit. We think some strong chemical agent had been put down the bathroom drains, however, on our fourth night in the studio we returned from dinner in town to find the bathroom and main room infested with tiny bugs (very like fleas) - they were everywhere and we had no idea where these bug/ fleas had come from but suspect the drains. It took us a couple of hours to get rid of them. For the remainder of our stay we closed all the sink and washbasin drains and tightly covered over the drain hole in the shower and this seemed to stop the bugs/fleas getting in.