The house is fantastic. So gorgeous. Sits about 2 miles from the parkway, up a winding road, deep in the woods. Looks like a castle of sorts, complete with stone facings, deep brown mahogany wood beams, etc. Has a gigantic ceiling height (maybe 50+ feet in the atrium). Rooms are over-sized; each room has a king bed, walk-in closet, and en suite bath (the showers look like they could fit 10+ people...). The dining room seats up to 20 people at one time.
The best part of the house was the lower porch with the outdoor fire place.
Bunk room has 4 beds; the top railings are a little low; everyone was scared that the kids were going to fall out during the night.
Media room is fantastic.
The bad (I think many of these could have easily been solved by the property manager)
- no welcome book provided or home instructions (had to reach out to property manager to get the wifi passcode, where this could have been provided ahead of time; Also it would have been nice to have an overview of the house systems detailed in the book; calling out that there are 2 thermostats, etc)
- Internet/Wifi speed is unreliable. It helps to be connected but it is still pretty spotty.
- Not enough towels (I think we were supplied with 12-15 regular sized towels, but there were no bathmats or many hand towels provided; when you use the hot tub, you need 2x the amount of towels as many of us didn't want to use the same towel)
- Hot tub - the hot tub water was pretty murky. No chemicals were left behind for the guests to fix themselves.
- Kitchen - We were expecting there to be basic food items in the house (salt, pepper, oil, etc) but this was not the case.
There was a spice rack left in the house, which was nice, but many of the bottles were empty including the salt/pepper.
- lack of cleaning items - some bathrooms had hand soap, while some did not (and there weren't any extra bottles around). some bathrooms had hand towels for hand drying, some did not. There was not a broom/dust pan to be found for tidying up.
-little fire wood provided ; besides for the 3 logs provided, it would have been nice to know where you could buy additional firewood or gotten advice to collect wood from forest floor). Also there were no lighters or matches provided. Luckily one of us carried matches, so we were able to start the fires each night...