Our home away from home this month is an apartment on the 5th floor of an elegant 7-story, late 19th Century building in the 14th Arrondissment of Paris. Our street, Rue Ernest Cresson, is a short side street tucked off of a major boulevard, Avenue du General Leclerc.

While the “Le Boulevard” bustles with lots of vehicular and foot traffic, our little side street is relatively quiet and we are usually unaware of traffic noise except for the occasional “DEE-doo, DEE-doo, DEE-doo” sound of police and EMT vehicles. Mom always says that sound takes her back to WWII movies, LOL

We enter our building through a security door and an interior door, both controlled by a key fob. Once inside the building, there is a narrow vestibule, a narrow staircase and an even narrower elevator. It’s cool how they retrofitted the elevator into the center of the staircase, but the car is a really tight squeeze. It took three trips to get all our luggage, mom, Tania (our official greeter) and me up to the apartment.

Ours is the only apartment on the 5th floor. So when you manage to extricate yourself from the elevator, you see this gorgeous walnut door, brass doorknob and doorbell. I will confess that I was a bit concerned by our elevator experience and was not sure what to expect when we open the door.

This place is huge — at least by Parisian standards. You step into a wide, shallow foyer and straight ahead, through French doors, is the living room. A few steps to the left is the dining room, and two more steps and a quick left turn takes you into the kitchen.

The living room and dining room overlook Rue Ernest Cresson and opposite us are other late 19th Century buildings with commercial spaces below and offices and apartments above. We have a motorcycle repair place on the ground floor to one side, and a massage salon (not the icky kind) on the other side. No bikers hanging around the street below our building, just bikes waiting to be repaired.

The apartment is owned by a French couple who live here in the winter and spend their summers at their second home in Spain. They just left on March 30, so we are the first renters of the season.

The apartment has lots of gorgeous traditional touches, like the original moldings and brass door handles.

Tania told us that the owners are world travelers and that Madame’s brother is an artist who painted many of the larger canvases in the apartment.

In addition to the more traditional Western European paintings, everywhere you look, there is interesting art from Africa and Asia.

But I am guessing that some Americans from a specific school in Florida might not be as fascinated as I am by some of the pieces in the dining room.

The rest of the apartment is located down this long, narrow hallway.

The first doorway is the TINY hall bath, then the main bedroom with en-suite and at the end of the hall, the second bedroom. Our bedrooms overlook an interior courtyard, so we never hear any street noise. Oh, and each bedroom and the living room has a TV, but we have not felt the need to turn them on, and frankly, we haven’t missed watching TV.

Of course, no place is perfect. There are a few small issues, none of them being deal-breakers. The first is the creaky wooden floors that make a heck of a racket no matter how quiet we try to be. Apparently, the apartment above us has the same flooring, LOL. The second is the chairs and sofas — as is typical in France, they are more stylish than comfortable.

And finally, well, remember that scaffolding? It seems that the building next door is being renovated. Good thing we lived in a construction zone the first four years of our time in South Carolina, so we are pretty used to hammering and sawing. And unlike the US, French workers knock off at exactly 5 pm and don’t work weekends!

One final observation: Apparently, Madame is a bit of a control freak. During our arrival briefing, Tania went to great pains to explain that we were not to mark up walls, rearrange the furniture, and under no circumstances were we to use the abrasive pot sponge on the countertops.

And just in case we were not clear on that prohibition, it was reinforced in the House manual. I imagine her returning from her summer in Spain and frantically checking the state of the countertops before she has even taken off her coat, LOL.

I will admit that I am a bit paranoid now and have put away two statutes that were displayed in the long hallway with the uneven floor JUST IN CASE. 😁