The apartment was very nice. This is a great neighborhood with many beautiful homes and we felt very safe taking long walks in the area. The apartment is well kept, clean upon arrival and the appliance all worked well. The bed was comfortable and there was great water pressure in the shower. Overall, it was a very comfortable place to stay.
There are two issues that need to be addressed to make it a five-star experience:
1) The cooking pans need work or a refresh, see the attached picture. We picked this place to be able to cook our meals here and I spent a good amount of time working on cleaning the largest fry pan with a SOS pad so we could use it. Not a big issue but when you’re paying over $290 a day (we were in Austin during a peak period), you don’t expect to scrub the pots and pans when you arrive.
2) The second and bigger issue is the driveway. Many homes in Austin have the two parking pads down the center of their driveways and, if you look at them throughout the neighborhood, you will see they are gravel fill at the same level as the pads. But, the parking pads in this driveway are missing the gravel filling that is supposed to be on both sides of the pads. There is up to a 4-5 inch drop off on each side and the concrete edge has a sharp line at the top. This was a real problem for our sedan’s tires when making a 90 degree turn at the end of the driveway to turn onto the pads in the area designated for this apartment. The sharp edges of each concrete pads could be heard rubbing loudly on the sides of the tires when turning into this area. You can see this has been a problem for other cars based on the black marks worn into each pad. We stopped using this area as soon as we
discovered this issue. I'm hoping our car tires were not damaged, but have yet to go to the tire store and have them inspected. Dumping a load of gravel to fill in between the pads and bring this area up to the proper grade will solve this problem and prevent damage to other guest's tires in the future.
The owner sent me a message that they intend to fix both issues in the future.