How to choose between one apartment and the whole house
The answer is almost never the number of beds. It is whether the group wants to be in the same building at breakfast.
Not a blog
Everything we have written
six pieces, each one a long answer to a question this way of letting a house actually raises, written at the length the question deserves rather than compressed to fit beside a price.
Most of what this site has to say already lives on the page it belongs to: a rate is on the rates page, a step count is on the apartment it describes. What is here instead is the handful of questions that do not have a one-line answer — whether to book an apartment or the whole house, what a cleaning fee is actually paying for, why a summer stay has a real minimum, what a seated number for a wedding actually depends on, how arrival works with nobody behind a counter, and what a city garden in Queens is and is not.
There is no publishing calendar behind this page. A piece is added when a question has come up often enough, and in different enough words, that answering it once in public is more honest than answering it slightly differently on the telephone every time it is asked.
What a cleaning fee actually pays for
Two to three hours for an apartment and four for the house, by people who are paid for it. Here is the whole list, because a fee nobody explains looks like a fee somebody invented.
Why there is a five-night minimum in July
Not to extract money from you. A two-night let in the middle of a week leaves two nights nobody can sell on either side of it.
What "thirty-four seated" really means in a house
It means the garden is usable. Indoors alone the number is sixteen, and the difference is the single most useful thing to know before booking a date in October.
Arriving at a house with no front desk
What replaces the person behind the counter is a written arrival, sent a week early, with photographs. It works better than the counter did.
A city garden is not a lawn
Eleven hundred square feet behind a house in Queens, with a brick wall and an elevated railway four minutes away. What it is good for, and what it is not.
Check the dates you want
The calendar is live. It shows what is free, it will not sell the same night twice, and it prints the whole total — cleaning fee included — before it asks for a name.