It must be said that Maison du Lierre's website is very deceptive. We decided to book a week at "maison" on the strength of the images shown on the site. At €80 for a double room per night, we did not expect the Ritz but the rooms looked basic but fresh and clean. We were most dissappointed when we arrived. The door was locked and we had to call a number pinned on the front door to alert a receptionist. The foyer of the hotel looked ok, simply decorated, a bit rustic but the room was a vast dissappointment. It was absolutely teeny weeny. How they crammed a double bed into it was unfathomable. One had to shuffle around the bed in a sideways fashion to access the toilet or balcony. The room stank of toilet. The toilet stank of damp. The towels stank of other people. There were fleas on the shower curtain. The balcony overlooked brick walls and backyards. The "wardrobe" was a blanket pinned to a wall and the walls were so thin that we heard every possible detail of an adjacent amorous tryst. We decided the following morning to seek out another hotel immediately and we booked into the excellent Hotel Normandie. My husband politely offered to pay for 2 nights to cover the inconvenience of our departure at short notice but the lady he dealt with was most unpleasant about the whole issue and insisted that we pay for 3 nights. To summarise, this hotel is very poor value and far from clean.

I stayed in the Maison du Lierre in July 2006 with my husband. The hotel was fine. It was clean, had small basic rooms and a good location. The breakfast was also good, and was served in a back garden. Had I paied half of what we did, I would have been very happy. For the price I would have expected much more though: It was extremely hot, but the hotel didn't provide us with fans. Also, the reception was shut most of the time, so it was difficult getting help with booking e.g. taxis or restaurant tables. It would also have been nice if the hotel could provide cold drinks (minibar or sales from the reception). There were no possibilites of using the internet. You basically were left to your own.

Hôtel de Normandie and Hôtel Bristol (and, I am sure, numerous other hotels) around the corner have similar rates, but are 3 star hotels with many more facilities. I haven't stayed in any of these, so I couldn't guarantee for their quality though.

We were looking to stay in central Bordeaux over a weekend and struggled to find anything suitable. No reviews on TripAdvisor to help but the Maison du Lierre was recommended in a few press article and the website looks great. The good things - the house is charming (it isn't really a hotel more a B&B), the rooms at the back are amazingly quiet given that it is smack bang in the middle of everything (I think the front rooms would be noisy though) and the beds are really comfortable. I guess the bad things - rooms small and basic - simply come down to the fact that it doesn't cost very much to stay there. You need to be pretty precise about what time you are arriving, if you get it wrong you'e left standing outside a locked door with a phone number to call for someone to let you in (£8 the call charges came out at). Also parking is right across the road but it's unsuitable for anything big really and on the road parking would be difficult

Overall for the money it was fine if you want to be in the centre and don't want to spend a lot of money.