For a family celebration, we had looked forward to our stay in Berkeley. Given our usual fabulous experiences at carefully-chosen bed and breakfasts, we assumed that our due diligence meant the Belrose House would be a comfortable accommodation. Were we wrong!

The litany of inconveniences is long, so I'll provide just the highlights. Despite confirming our booking by letter prior to arrival requesting that we be moved to the large room in the back of the house after the second night of a six-day stay (as we were promised), our host 'inadvertantly' forgot that she had given the room to someone else. We discovered those guests had booked their stay after we had requested the 'quiet' room, so I assume our hostess just wanted to maximize her income from the room because of the length of stay of those guests.

After our first two nights and with her permission, we had moved ourselves across the hall from the small, front, very noisy room to the quiet (relatively speaking) back room. Then, with only one night in that room and expecting to remain there for the rest of our stay, we came back to the b and b from a long day out to find that the innkeeper had moved all our things back into the front room (without our permission and with no warning) to accommodate those other guests. It seems inconceivable to me that a host would go through all her guests' effects without their permission - things stowed in drawers, in the closet, in the bathroom, and on shelves - in order to move them from one room to another. Guests' privacy and issues of common decency were clearly not a concern for this host. This represents only the most egregious problem.

Although the host is friendly, her lack of attention to detail seems incredible for one running a bed and breakfast. Breakfasts were horrible: spoiled fruit, stale pastries on most mornings, stale cereal, and no real coffee on several days - only decaf - despite our saying politely more than once we preferred caffenated coffee. Thankfully, there is a Peet's nearby, so most mornings we bought our coffee and breakfast out.

When we arrived, the bathroom rug was dirty and the bedroom carpet stained and dirty. We asked to have the bathroom rug replaced, and it was. The front bedroom had a dirty bedspread and poor quality bed linens. Shelves in the room had accumulated dust and the bath tub had hair left in it from a previous guest. The mattress was comfortable. In fact, we noticed a general lack of cleanliness around the common rooms in the house as well.

The Belrose House is on a very busy street. We were aware of this when we booked, knowing we'd be in the front room, but were told that noise was not a problem. Clearly, a perversion of reality. There was almost 24 hour street noise!

There is also an outdoor pool advertised, but it was not in working order and it too looked grubby and uninviting. Garden plantings are lovely but they are inadequately looked after so there was little incentive to sit outdoors by the pool when weather turned unexpectedly warm.

We undertand there only a few b and b's in Berkeley, so it is apparently a sellers' market. The Belrose House is not inexpensive. We felt conned by what we had been told prior to arrival and what actually existed when we arrived, and believe that potential guests should be forewarned. I can only hope our experience there was an aberration, but I gather not from what we later learned from someone with knowledge of how the place operates.

You can bet we won't stay there again. How sad; with the right innkeeper and attention to cleanliness and other details, the place could be charming.