Hera House was an interesting old place with old charm.
The Pros:
Dia was extremely conscientious with messaging, and she gave us a lot of details about our would-be stay in the place, warning us an extra time before confirming our booking that there is no central heat or air and that we would need to use the room heater as it was going to get down into frigid temps the nights we stayed. There are lots of little artsy touches to the place and cool plants in the sitting room. The shower water pressure was excellent and there was plenty of hot water.
The Cons:
The upstairs is not separated from the rest of the house with a door or anything. You walk in and walk up an extremely noisy set of old wooden stairs, so if you are coming in late carrying luggage, it is going to sound like a 500-lb. gorilla is carrying another 500-lb. gorilla up the stairs which make crazy loud noises with every single step you take. And that noise doesn't end with the stairs. When you get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, everyone in that house is gonna hear every move you make in there.
Once up there, you have a bedroom at the end of the hall and a sitting room across the hall from that. The toilet is at the opposite end of the hall in a closet so small, the tank is literally sideways from the toilet seat itself and you have to do a little 180-degree turn dance after walking straight in to get into the room and be able to shut the door to sit on it, otherwise you will likely not fit. There's no curtain on the window in there. The sink is actually next to your bed back in your bedroom down at the other end of the hall, so you use the toilet and then cannot wash your hands until you go back down the hall to your room (touching every doorknob on the way).
The shower/tub is yet in another different room next to the toilet closet, and the thing is, there is a rather large picture window in the shower with no curtain. And remember, no central heat either. SO, in other words, you have to turn on this heat lamp above the tub so you don't freeze your butt off BUT that bright spotlight shines directly down on yourself standing in a big open picture window while you're taking a shower. It really felt like I was flashing the whole neighborhood, as the window is the perfect height for, well, an average adult female's head and torso. It's like a free nekked shower show to the alley and buildings next door. No clue why there isn't a curtain of some kind there (especially since the water from the shower sprays down on the natural wood window which is just gonna eventually rot it).
But the worst part of our stay had to be that bed. It was basically like sleeping on a set of cinder blocks with a sheet on top. My entire body hurt each morning upon waking like I slept on, well, cinder blocks. Thus, I got barely any sleep during our stay. It's a hard wooden platform thing with nothing but a hard, thin mattress on top and that's it. Sleeping on that thing really actually hurt. Bad. My husband and I both woke up after the second night with painful kinks in our necks feeling like total crap from such poor sleep due to what has to be the cheapest mattress Ikea sells. A foam topper would go such a long way to make it at least bearable. Or a mattress that doesn't hate its existence as a mattress. We're still recovering from lack of sleep and being sore after our stay here.
Also, in case you don't know, you will be staying two blocks away from the main strip of a party district. We aren't from Dallas and had no clue. There were groups of five drunk people walking down the street at 2 am talking so loud, we could hear everything they were saying from inside our room. Sirens from cops intermittently going off, probably dealing with more of the same. A sketchy guy standing at the corner watching us unload our car the first night. Overall it just felt... not that safe really.
Also the wifi didn't work the whole time we were there... something about needing to check the router, but it didn't really matter as we didn't absolutely need it for work. Just would've been a nice distraction because, as there's no TV in the room, and the mattress hurts to sleep on, there's nothing to distract yourself with except the sounds of drunk people screaming at each other in the streets below at 2 am.
Conclusion:
I thought Dia seemed very nice from her messages, but of all the things she warned me about before she would confirm my booking, we would've been cool with all of it... If only she had told us that bed was like sleeping on a cold, hard, merciless cement slab, we would've straight up passed.
P.S. - I love the Airbnb model overall, but one of the problems I have with it is that because everyone wants a good rating, renters do not tend to be fully honest about the places they stay in on here. As a renter, I hate that part because I want to know the real picture, not some gussied up bunch of pretty adjectives that don't tell the true story of what staying in a place is actually like so I can evaluate if I actually want to stay there or not.