This little cottage space is lovely, and it was the perfect amount of space for my daughter & I to call home for a span of days.
The cottage is set way back from the street (& from the main house), which makes it feel fairly secluded even though you’re right on the Mountain View / Palo Alto border. (Don’t worry: You can park in front of the cottage!) This unit does share a wall with another Airbnb unit, but the shared wall is this unit’s kitchen/dining area—so while we saw our (polite, friendly) neighbor a couple of times in the morning, I never once heard him while we were inside. The one thing you *do* hear here is the nearby Caltrain, but it’s not oppressively loud (e.g., we were going to bed on East Coast time—while Caltrain is still running—and it never woke us up).
This unit consists of a galley kitchen that opens into a dining & living area, plus a bathroom (tub+shower combination) and a good-sized bedroom. We could have used a couple more pots, but we appreciated how well-stocked the rest of the kitchen is. There’s a full-size gas range & oven; a microwave; a toaster oven; a coffee maker AND a french press + electric kettle; and I was thrilled to find a small rice cooker / steamer in there. There’s even a salad spinner if you need to wash some greens, and there are both glass & metal storage containers to put away your leftovers. In other words, this place is set up for people who are going to move in and really Live Here for a while. And if you go to the grocery store starving & jetlagged like I did, don’t worry—the refrigerator & freezer are big and perfectly empty.
The other thing I’ll say about this unit is that “sparkling clean” doesn’t even begin to cover it...this place is clean like you’re the first human being to ever set foot in it. So many Airbnb units err on the side of either “too lived-in” or “soullessly sparse,” but this one is Just Right: pristinely clean, but also there are kleenex boxes and scissors and all those other random odds & ends that real homes have and that real people end up needing over the course of a few days. We’ll look this one up the next time we need a place to stay in Silicon Valley. :)