We are not a hotel

What a hotel sells that a guest house does not

A guest house is a house somebody lets. The things a hotel sells that this does not have are worth listing rather than leaving to be discovered: there is no reception, so nobody takes a delivery for you; no porter, so the stairs are yours; no housekeeping during a stay under seven nights; no restaurant, no bar and no breakfast. What you get instead is a whole apartment with its own kitchen, its own door and nobody walking past it.

It is worth saying each absence out loud rather than leaving a guest to find it at the door. There is no reception counter, so nobody signs for a delivery on your behalf and nobody holds a spare key if you go out without one — there is no key to go out without, because every door here opens on a code rather than a lock. There is no porter, so the stoop and the two flights above the parlour floor are carried by whoever is carrying the case. There is no daily housekeeping on an ordinary stay, no turned-down bed in the evening, and no minibar restocked while the apartment is empty. There is also no restaurant, no bar and no breakfast room, on any floor, at any hour.

What is in the building instead

Every apartment has a full kitchen rather than a card asking you to dial a number for room service, and its own front door and its own key code rather than a shared corridor a stranger might also hold a card for.

There is no front desk and nobody sleeps in the building. If something goes wrong at two in the morning the telephone is answered by a person who lives twenty minutes away, and that is what a small guest house can promise rather than a night porter it does not employ.

A hotel's price mostly buys staff, spread across every room and every night it is open. This building carries none of that overhead, and the saving shows up as a nightly rate plus one cleaning fee, printed together, rather than as a lower headline number that grows once you are standing at a counter. Rates and what is included shows the whole of it, and self check-in explains exactly how arrival works with nobody there to meet you.

Who this suits, and who it does not

If what matters most is somebody at a desk at three in the morning, a bed turned down in the evening, or a cooked breakfast brought to a table, that is a fair thing to want and it describes a hotel rather than this building. If what matters is a kitchen, a door of your own and nobody walking past it, that is what an apartment here is built to do — and if a group wants all of that at once, that is the whole house rather than a room with a corridor outside it.

None of this is an argument against hotels. It is a description of a different kind of building, so the choice between the two gets made before arrival instead of at it. See the three apartments, or read what actually happens between one guest's departure and the next arrival on the changeover page.