The apartment we rented in Paris this time

A friend asked me to post pictures of the apartment we rented for our recent week in Paris. After our dog Collette "disappeared" on March 14, we decided pretty quickly that we ought to go spend a week in the big city, just for the change of scenery. We both like to walk the streets of Paris, and that's what we did every day, just to soak up the atmosphere. With all the demonstrations and protests, the atmosphere was particularly exciting.

We didn't have a lot of time to search for a place to stay, but we knew we wanted an apartment, not a hotel room. We enjoy being able to have breakfast in the apartment, and dinner most evenings. That way we can scout out the neighborhood boulangeries for the best bread and we can shop in charcuteries and produce stores and outdoor markets for dinner food that doesn't require any complicated cooking. Paris hotel rooms are notoriously small, and an apartment is always more pleasant.

On Internet forums I frequent, I had heard about a few reservation services that specialize in Paris apartments, so I started searching. Pretty quickly, I found a service called Opodohome with this apartment, called Marais Vertbois. Staying in the Marais sounded like a good idea, and the price was right: 490 euros for seven nights, plus a 25 euro cleaning fee. Almost any hotel room would have cost a lot more. And I knew the location: we wouldn't be far from the rue Montorgueil (where I lived for three years in the early 1980s) and from the rue de Bretagne, a nice rue commerçante in the 3rd arrondissement.

When we arrived, a young guy was coming out of the building and let us into the entryway. Two minutes later the owner of the apartment appeared; he had gone out to put some money in the horodateur (fancy parking meter) to make sure he didn't get a ticket. He showed us the place and we chatted for 30 minutes or so. His daughter lives in the U.S., and the rental apartment was where she lived when she was a student in Paris.

First impressions: I was a little taken aback at how sparely the place was furnished and how plain it looked. There was a sofa bed, an armchair, and a dining table with four chairs. The floor was vinyl tile except in the kitchen area and bathroom, where it was ceramic tile. Everything was clean, but it wasn't really spic and span, just passable. Still for the price...

We opened the sofa bed and tested it. It was pretty comfortable — not too soft or saggy, and without that awful sofabed rail you often get under your back and that you figure they designed that way so that extra guests wouldn't stay too long. The room was big enough — huge compared to the average Paris hotel room — that we just left the sofa bed folded out the whole time we were there. There was a second folding bed in the closet (behind the curtain) but we didn't use it.

The kitchen had small refrigerator and a two-burner, built-in electric hotplate. There was a good, easy-to-use microwave, and there was a toaster. There was an iron and ironing board that we didn't use (if you know us...).

The heat was a roll-around electric radiator in the main room and a wall-mounted electric radiator in the bathroom. All electricity and other utilities were included in the quoted rate. The owner accepted a check (either French or American) for the $300 or €300 security deposit. We hardly used the heat at all, but then we are used to the winter chill at this point.

There were coffee, tea, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, confiture, and a lot of other grocery staples in the kitchen cabinets, along with toilet paper, a little shampoo, some liquid soap, and a blow dryer in the bathroom. We ended up buying a box of Kleenex and some paper towels. The bathroom plumbing was fine. In the kitchen, there were plenty of cooking utensils and dishes for our purposes.

There were several pieces of furniture where we could put clothes, and there was closet space for hanging up our shirts. There was a decent TV and a boombox for radio. The water was always hot (too hot, really, but let's not quibble). Just off the entryway into the building, there was a room with several dumpsters where we could put not only kitchen garbage but paper and even bottles for recycling.


The apartment was quiet and comfortable. The main negative was its location on the ground floor, right on the street. The street wasn't at all busy, so there was not much car or motorcycle noise, but we could hear people walking by and talking. At night we heard were some sirens out on the rue St-Martin and some car alarms going off. But the biggest drawback was that we couldn't really open the shutters. When we did, people could look right in. We opened the shutters a little bit each day just to air the place out, and we really weren't there much in the daytime anyway.