Good location quirky lofts
The location is excellent if you want to be in the old port area. You can easily walk to restaurants. It’s a 10 minute walk to the metro. The staff are very pleasant and helpful. We enjoyed our stay.
But there are things you should be aware of if you’re thinking about staying in a loft. This applies only to the loft (apartment) number 603.
The lofts are not in the inn, but two blocks from the rear door of the inn. Someone will help you get your bags there and back. There are no elevators. We couldn’t figure out whether everybody in the building was a guest of the inn. It appeared that some were permanent residents, and that the inn just owned one or more apartments in the building.
Loft #603 consists of one large (maybe 25 feet by 25 feet) room, a reasonably large bedroom, a smaller bedroom, a bathroom, an entrance hall and kitchen. Walls are exposed brick and stone; pipes and electrical cables are exposed. The fireplace doesn’t work, and neither did the TV in the large room. The TV in the large bedroom did work but you have to string an extension cord through the door and plug it into an outlet in the large room. WiFi worked pretty well.
Lighting is inadequate: one person can sit next to the table lamp and have enough light to read comfortably, but others will find the light a little dim for reading. The cord for the lamp by the bedroom runs into the wall, then inside the wall to a spot several feet away where it emerges and is plugged into an outlet. This is beyond strange; it is a fire hazard.
It can get noisy. The people downstairs had a party that included children playing hockey in the hall. Someone upstairs rose each day at 6:30, flushed the toilet 15 or 20 times, then woke the children and got them started practicing their Morris dancing. OK, I exaggerate a little, but you will hear every flush, foot step and (muffled) conversation. Luckily, with the exception of the party night, people went to bed fairly early and we didn’t really find the noise too bothersome.
The large bedroom has a glass door, reducing privacy. The water heater has enough hot water for only two showers. Housekeeping makes the beds and changes the towels each day.
If you’re not cooking your own in the loft’s kitchen, breakfast is in the inn and it’s $10 (not included with the room as it would be if you were staying in the inn.) Our breakfasts were excellent and the service was prompt and courteous.
We arranged through the hotel for transportation to the hotel from the airport and back; it was reliable and pleasant. However, we were told by the hotel that the trip to the hotel would be $101 including tax and tip, and that the trip from the hotel would be somewhat less. We paid for both trips when we returned to the airport, and the bill was $232 not including tip. It’s about 20 minutes each way; I’d bet a cab would have been quite a bit less. For comparison, here in overpriced New Jersey a roughly equivalent round trip was $100 including tax and a pretty generous tip.