This is a very difficult review for us to write. There are many features of this Airbnb that are truly worthy of the best review: A beautiful neighborhood, quiet itself and very safe, a charming old house with a well appointed and spacious downstairs apartment that serves as the Airbnb, and friendly hosts. Unfortunately, the house is very noisy and this was a big issue for us. Our first week there was relatively quiet and we added a week to our stay at the end of that first week. Unfortunately, heavy noise started after this. It is a basement unit and some noise can be expected in such an accommodation. However, we have stayed at multiple other basement and first floor units in the past, including in older buildings, and they had never been nearly as noisy as this one. Prior reviews don’t mention the issue and we wonder why. It may be that, unlike us, other guests stayed only briefly and/or were out most of the time. We stayed for four weeks and teleworked from there. Alternatively, the host and her son, who live upstairs, may have been away from home during their prior guests’ stays. The host apparently travels a lot and also used to work full time before retiring in December 2020. Her son may have been away at college and overseas. When we were at the place, she was home full time for about 10-12 days. Her son was present during most of the rest of the time.
So, in our experience, when people are present upstairs, you can expect to hear almost everything happening there on a daily basis:
* Conversations
* The noisy plumbing,
* Footsteps on the bare, or very lightly carpeted, floors upstairs which appear to be made of hardwood or some other hard surface, with people often wearing hard soled footwear, and also literally running up and down their wood stairs repeatedly.
* Any motorized appliances operating upstairs
But this is not all. There were hours worth of noise during which it seemed heavy objects were being rearranged upstairs, plopped in different places or dragged across the floors above our heads. At first, I thought house cleaning was causing all this noise, and I mentioned it to our host. She responded that cleaning would not start before 10 am. However, the noise continued, starting very early in the morning. So, maybe it was not cleaning. It sounded like furniture being moved around, including just above our bedroom. It often started just after 7 am, and, one time, on a Sunday morning, it started at barely after 6 am. This went on for days and reached an apex one Wednesday, in the middle of the night. All of sudden, at about 3:30 AM we heard a great commotion. Foot steps, drawers/doors opening and closing, intense shuffling of things for an hour until about 4:30 am when we heard the rumbling of luggage being rolled on the floor above our heads and then going out the front door which closed behind it. It turns out that our host was leaving on a trip that day and had not given us any heads up on her leaving that early, or on the loud noise that would precede her departure, wake us up and keep us awake in the middle of the night. After she left, her son was not particularly quiet either, doing a lot of his own shuffling, rearranging and other activities, as well as repeatedly running up and down their stairs.
In hindsight, the host and her son are clearly aware that noise can be an issue because they have unusually spelled out house rules out for their Airbnb guests, such as not talking in “loud voices” and not slamming doors… They also have an official "quiet time" for the guests starting at 9 pm, with no ending time mentioned. We strived to be as quiet as possible, to the point of often literally whispering instead of using normal voices for our conversations, as well as being near dead quiet after 9 pm. Sadly, the noise upstairs could be almost around the clock as described above.
We just cannot recommend this place to other guests, at least not for long term stays or for people doing anything other than just sleeping there, and even then maybe not unless there is no-one upstairs during their stay, or the guests use noise cancelling ear phones/buds or heavy duty white noise machines day and night.