I wanted so much to be excited about this place and I was until we arrived. But the minute I got to the door I realized it's not at all how it's represented online. The location is probably the best characteristic - we enjoyed walking around Cambridge, although it's a somewhat long, but nice, walk through the neighborhood to Harvard Yard, and very far from MIT.
The place itself is not nice. Don't be deceived by the cute external architecture - the entrance is not even at the front and you don't get to even have access to the front windows or second floor. It's just a rather dilapidated back entrance to a part of the house in the back through the parking space. The kitchen is renovated but dated and dark. The bathroom is really weird - the toilet has a heated seat (which is fine since it was really the only warm thing in the apartment the first day we were there) but weirdly automatic, and the shower is just strange - you walk up some steps into a deep copper box with a very complicated 'rain shower' that took forever to heat up and figure out. The living room was unusable with a very bizarre L-shaped velvet red couch right out of Soviet Moscow. And while the murphy beds weren't uncomfortable, the bed rooms are rickety and oddly furnished. Why is there a swivel desk chair and no desk? The place is just oddly decorated throughout and, as a designer, I can't say it's a cool or creative oddness, it's just odd and mismatched. The towels need upgrading and we were freezing the first 24 hours with no response from the host until the next day. The entrance codes were not listed on the Vrbo app or in the reservation, and they came in an email not through Vrbo but from the host directly and ended up in my spam so I had no way of knowing how to get into the house and the host was not responsive.
So in sum, for the very HIGH cost for this location, it's WAY over priced for what you get. Either the price needs to come way down or there needs to be significant upgrades to rationalize the high cost. I don't recommend it until one of those two things happens. There is NOTHING LUXURY about this place.
