Myself and my husband stayed in apartment 315 in June of this year. When we arrived our first impression of the apartment was 'cramped'. It is a studio apartment so we weren't expecting it to be big but they just seem to have crammed too much in. It would be fine with just the double bed but they have also squeezed in a sofa bed. It means you can't really get through to the bed from one side and it also makes access to the wardrobe quite difficult. You have nowhere to put your empty suitcases out of the way. Also the addition of the sofa bed means there are absolutely no drawers in the unit at all to keep your clothes. The shelf in the wardrobe has the bedding for the sofa bed on it and the one bedside unit has only 2 drawers which are also crammed with bedding for the sofa bed. You need some drawers to put things in when you are on holiday, yes lots of things get hung in the wardrobe but I am not in the habit of hanging up my bikini or my underwear and there is absolutely nowhere to keep such items! I ended up piling things on the sofa bed which just made the apartment look like a messy teenage boys bedroom! The apartment is in a great location, the Barbizon is right on Ocean Drive on the corner of 6th and just across the road from a nice part of the beach but be warned, being on Ocean Drive and being at the front of the building means at weekends you will not get any sleep. We arrived on a Friday and the bar/restaurant next door turns into a club at weekends, they have a speaker on the outside wall which is just outside the window of this apartment! When i say we didn't get any sleep I really mean it! They are supposed to keep the noise down after midnight I think so to get around this they keep turning the volume up and down, it means just as you start to drop off the music outside your window suddenly gets cranked up. The next morning we called the lady who met us when we arrived and asked if there were any other apartments available at the back of the building that we could move to as i was unable to spend a week somewhere and not get any sleep. She was willing to move us but had nothing for another 2 days. We asked around and were told the music was only loud at the weekends so by the time we could move we thought it should be quiet in the one we were already in. We went and bought some ear plugs from the local CVS and thought we would try that! It did help, added to the fact we were so tired from the lack of sleep the night before we did manage to get more sleep the next night. I have stayed at the Park Central on Ocean Drive before and did not experience sleep less nights but obviously the apartment description fails to mention the speaker outside your window!
The cleanliness of the apartment left a lot to be desired in my opinion, i used the cleaning products under the sink to clean the bathroom floor before i would step on it in bare feet. It was covered in long dark hairs and I have blonde hair so they certainly weren't mine! It just looked like it hadn't been cleaned at all since the last guests checked out. I looked for a dust pan and brush but they don't provide one so I couldn't sweep them up. This meant after a few days the floor was very sandy too so I had to clean it again with paper towel, have you ever tried getting sand off a floor with paper towel?? I also cleaned the bath and got on my hands and knees and cleaned the floor in the kitchen area which seemed to have sticky patches on. I did think about calling the lady who gave us the keys back and showing her then asking for it to be cleaned properly but by the time you have waited in for that to be done you had just as well do it yourself and get on with your holiday.
We actually checked out a day early and moved to the Sagamore for our last night, to be honest I felt like I needed a bit of luxury and space around me!
Considering we didn't pay much more for our trip last time to the Park Central I would definitely choose this option over the Barbizon in future. I think some of the apartments people live in and our neighbours had a couple of late night (very loud) arguments, which typically happened on the nights we didn't have P Diddy blaring outside our window and were trying to sleep without the ear plugs! The hall ways absolutely stank of stale smoke and were in need of updating. It looked like someone that was colour blind had done some touching up of the chipped paint but had used a different colour so it still looked a mess.
Overall, for us disappointing. Only people I would recommend to would be people that don't plan on going to bed before 5am at the weekends and those who don't mind someone else's hair all over the floor. I personally would stay somewhere else in future.