The layout of the house was great and plenty of rooms and space for our extended family of 11. We loved spending time on the porches and cooking together in the open kitchen while still having privacy on the different floors with the bedrooms and bathrooms. The couches and beds were comfortable, there was plenty of closet space, and the kitchen was well stocked with enough dishes and cutlery and cooking supplies for our large group.
The location of the home was quite central to a lot of the activities we wanted to do - easy access to get downtown and Pike Place Market in about 10 minutes while also having some nice neighborhood restaurants and groceries stores that were a quick walk or drive away. Also, there are plenty of parks and botanical gardens and other green spaces nearby, and with the highway being so close even traveling further away was easy to do since we had close access to I-5.
The noise on the main two levels was very reasonable, but the garden level downstairs suite was much noisier. Particularly in the main bedroom on that lowest level, the folks sleeping there could hear train horns every hour, airplanes overhead, and a lot of highway traffic. Earplugs helped there, and the rest of the bedrooms were much better in terms of noise, but the kind bed on the garden level floor was noticeably louder and harder to sleep in than the rest of the rooms. The noise and proximity to the highway was mentioned in the description of the rental, though, so this wasn’t a deal breaker.
However, the main reason I cannot give this rental a 5 star review is that there were some significant communication gaps. The host was not very quick to respond to some of our questions and comments we had about the house - Eric did eventually come by the house to address one question about a loose doorknob, but that stop by was unannounced and unexpected. And one question about someone who we assumed was a gardener that was cutting flowers in the backyard was never addressed… we were in our pajamas and night gowns eating dessert at the dining room table and looked out the window to see a man clipping roses below us, so I just have to hope that was a planned activity.
My biggest concern was around some work that the host was doing around the house on Saturday afternoon while we were still renting the space (our checkout was Sunday morning). This involved us coming home to the garage door open without any prior notice that anyone would be coming by, some hammering outside near the front door while we were trying to rest after a morning outing, and some work and moves in the backyard with direct view into the downstairs bedrooms and spaces while people were trying to relax and weren’t really dressed for company. None of the work mentioned here that Eric came over to do on Saturday afternoon was connected to any of my messages to the host, and many of these activities seemed like the kind of things that should have been completed between different guests’s stays instead of during our family vacation.
None of these issues on their own really would have been an issue if we had known in advance and had been able to discuss with the owner, but all of those activities happened without any communication until they were already underway (or in the case of the open garage, until after we had already come home and closed the garage ourselves). I hope that this was an exception to the host’s normal interaction style, but in our experience the communications were delayed lacking, taking away from our AirBnB stay experience.