One apartment is not the house

One building, sold two ways

This is the one thing about the way the house is sold that a guest can get wrong, and it is our fault if they do. The building is let two ways: three apartments separately, or the whole house to one party. An apartment let is a private apartment with its own front door and its own key code — and a shared garden, a shared stoop and a shared stair. Whether you have the garden to yourself on a Tuesday in July is a question about who else booked, and no page on this site will tell you that you will. If having the building to yourself is the point, that is the whole-house let, and it costs what it costs because it takes three apartments off sale.

The plainest way to say it is the one the diagram below draws: three apartments live inside one house, and the house is offered for sale twice — once as three separate lettings and once as a single one. A night sold in The Garden Apartment takes The Whole House off the calendar for that night, and a night sold as The Whole House takes all three apartments off it. Neither direction is the exception; both are the same rule, read from opposite ends.

What "exclusive" would have to mean, and when it is true

The garden, the stoop and the stair are not inside any one apartment's own four walls, so booking an apartment does not book them outright. On a night when only one apartment is let, a guest may well have the garden to themselves without anybody promising it; on a night when two or three are let, they will not, and no page on this site pretends otherwise.

An apartment is not the house. An apartment booking is a private apartment, not a private house: the other two apartments may be let on the same nights, and the garden, the stoop and the stair are shared. The whole-house let is the one that takes the building off sale.

The only product that can honestly promise the garden, the stoop, the stair and the rest of the building to one party is the one that takes all of it off sale at once: the whole house. That is not a sales pitch for the larger product; it is the only arrangement under which the promise is even possible to keep.

Why the whole-house rate is what it is

Letting the house whole removes three apartments' worth of nights from sale at once, and the rate is built around that trade rather than around a discount. A worked example makes the arithmetic checkable instead of asserted:

Notice that the minimum stay applied above is not the house's own three-night minimum — it is whichever of the house's minimum and the season's is longer, which is explained at length on why a summer minimum stay exists and on minimum stays explained.

What this means when you book

If having the building to yourself is the point of the trip, book the whole house. If the point is a private apartment for two or four people at a lower nightly rate, any of the three gives you that apartment, its own kitchen and its own front door — and a garden, a stoop and a stair that may belong to somebody else's stay on the same night. The live calendar shows which of the four is actually free before either of those questions has to be guessed at.