About the house
Fifteen apartments around a courtyard
Sherborne is an apart-hotel on Provulok Mykilskyi, one lane off the Pechersk hill. Fifteen apartments, five floors, one lift and a gate onto a closed courtyard. This page is the longer version of what that means.
The house in figures
- 15 apartments
- 5 floors, one lift
- One closed courtyard
- Reception, 24 hours
The house
The building holds fifteen apartments over five floors, arranged around a courtyard that is closed at the gate. The courtyard is the reason the apartments are quiet in spite of the address: the windows that matter face trees and parked cars rather than the lane. There is a lift to all five floors, security on site around the clock, and a reception that is staffed at three in the morning as well as at three in the afternoon.
Nothing here is on a corridor of identical doors. The apartments run from thirty square metres to seventy, in four sizes, and the difference between them is space and doors rather than luxury: the same kitchen, the same washing machine, the same bathroom tile and the same desk in all fifteen.
What an apart-hotel is
A hotel sells you a room and the services around it. An apart-hotel sells you an apartment and keeps the services. You get a front door, a kitchen with a hob and an oven and pans, a washing machine, a dining table and a desk — and you also get daily housekeeping, clean linen, luggage held before check-in, printing at reception and somebody on the desk all night.
The difference shows up on about the fourth day. In a hotel room the fourth day is when you start eating every meal out and washing shirts in a basin. Here you can cook properly at seven, put a wash on at midnight, spread your work across a table and leave it there, and let two people keep different hours without one of them sitting in a corridor. It is the reason guests who came for three nights stay a month, and the reason a month here is a different proposition from a month in a hotel.
No two are alike
Every apartment was furnished on its own, so they do not match. One sits under the roof beams on the fifth floor, in honey-coloured pine, with windows low over the courtyard. One is striped in raspberry. One is in dark blue damask. We tell you which apartment is yours before you arrive, and if you have stayed here before you can ask for it again — which a fair number of people do.
Thirty years in Pechersk
Sherborne opened when almost nobody in Kyiv let apartments by the night, and thirty years on it is doing the same thing: renting whole apartments, with kitchens, to people who need more than a bed. Pechersk around it has changed names, governments and languages; the lane, the gate and the courtyard have not moved.
The rest of it
The apartments have a page each, with the photographs and the figures. If you are staying a month or more, the long-stay page is the one to read.