Hugely grand, artistically decorated, 2-floor historic home from centuries past in a great location, but not without downsides.
LAYOUT: Plenty of room, with multiple sitting areas (three) in addition to the billiards room, outdoor basketball area, and large back patio. No formal dining room, just a kitchen table. There are 2.5 bathrooms, but only 1 of the bathrooms is upstairs where six of the seven bedrooms are located. (The single downstairs bedroom is the dorm room.)
CLEANLINESS: while the place is superficially/quick cleaned, it is way overdue for a deep steam cleaning—-lots of drapes, window dressings, rugs. Cute but stuff but super strong musty odor, think thrift store smell (that strange mix of old skin cells, dust, and damp fur). Although everyone smelled it, the odor affected my guests in different ways, with it not bothering some and really bothering others (one person even had to wear a breathing mask to filter the must particles from the air). Odor aside, we also had issues with the cleanliness/creepiness of the downstairs bathrooms. Weird clear slimy substance was in the water when one guest used the sink water to brush and rinse, which led us to stop using the downstairs restrooms (well that and the creepiness of them). The upstairs restroom is fine, but it wasn’t ideal to have the 7 of us share.
CHECK-IN/CHECK-OUT: no self-check; you’ll have to arrange this with host. Good thing is that they are quite flexible to the extent they can be.