Deposits and cancellations
A quarter of the total down, the balance on arrival, and two different cancellation clocks — a shorter one for a stay, and a considerably longer one for an event — because an event takes far more of the building off sale, for longer, and usually on the dates everything else would have sold fastest anyway.
- The deposit
- A quarter of the total is taken when the booking is made and the balance is due on the day of arrival. The total includes the cleaning fee, because it is part of the price rather than an extra.
- Cancelling a stay
- More than fourteen days before arrival, the deposit is returned in full. Between fourteen and seven days, half of it. Inside seven days the deposit is kept and the balance is not taken. There is no charge for shortening a stay that has already begun, but the nights are not refunded either.
- Cancelling an event
- An event takes the whole building out of sale for up to three days, so the terms are firmer: more than sixty days before, the deposit is returned; between sixty and thirty days, half; inside thirty days it is kept. It is the only thing on this site with a sixty-day line and the reason is that the house cannot re-sell a Saturday in June at three weeks' notice.
- The refundable hold
- Three hundred dollars for an apartment and seven hundred and fifty for the whole house, taken as an authorisation on the day of arrival and released within five working days of departure. It is not a payment and it does not appear on the quote as one.
- Damage
- Things break in a house that is a hundred and fourteen years old and most of it is not charged for. A glass, a plate, a chair leg — no. The parlour floor, the plaster cornice and the original sash frames are the three things that cannot be replaced, and they are the three things the hold exists for.
Why an event's cancellation window is longer than a stay's
Cancelling a stay frees one thing back onto the calendar: the apartment or the whole house you booked, for however many nights you had it. Cancelling an event frees a great deal more. Take a small wedding as the example: it holds the house for three nights at a stretch — the night for setting up, the day itself, and the night after for clearing down — and because the whole house contains every apartment, those same nights come off sale for all four of the things this house sells, not just the one that was booked. A cancelled apartment booking is a single room back on the calendar the moment it is cancelled. A cancelled event is the whole building, for several nights, usually on dates — a Saturday in the middle of wedding season, say — that are exactly the nights everything else would have sold fastest anyway.
That is the whole reason an event's notice period runs so much longer than a stay's: the same shape of deposit is protecting a far larger, far harder-to-resell block of the calendar, and the house needs more warning to have any real chance of filling it from somebody else's cancelled plan. The exact number of days for each is above, in the policy itself — this page is the argument for why they differ, not a second place to look up what they are.
Cancelling. A stay cancelled more than fourteen days before arrival is refunded in full. An event has a sixty-day line instead, because it takes the whole building out of sale for up to three days.
The refundable hold. The refundable hold is an authorisation taken on arrival and released within five working days of departure. It is not a payment and it is not part of the quoted total.
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.