What a 1926 building sounds like

The street

61st Street carries buses and traffic from about half past five in the morning until midnight. The three Parlour Kings have the bay windows over it, and they are the biggest and lightest rooms in the building; they are also the ones you can hear the street from with the window shut. Double glazing was fitted in 2014 and it helps, and it does not make the room silent.

The railway

The elevated line is two blocks away. You can hear it from the front rooms as a rising and falling rumble every few minutes, more at rush hour, less after midnight, never absent. Some people find it completely unremarkable after the first night. Some people do not sleep through it. We cannot tell you which you are, which is why the back rooms exist.

The back of the house

The four Garden Queens and the two Courtyard Twins face the walled garden and the brick courtyard. They are genuinely quiet — the garden wall takes the street out, and there is nothing behind us but other people's gardens. If a quiet night is the thing that decides your trip, book one of those six rooms and stop reading.

Inside the building

The house is timber framed and the floors are original. Footsteps carry between floors, the stairs creak in three places we know by name, and the plumbing is audible when somebody runs a bath at midnight. None of that is a fault to be fixed; it is what a hundred-year-old wooden house is. The Attic Doubles hear the least of it, because there is nobody above them.

Quiet in the house from 10:00pm, and the garden closes at the same time. That is the neighbours' rule rather than ours, and it is enforced.

Front rooms face a bus route. This is a timber-framed house built in 1926 on a street with buses on it. The back rooms are quiet and the front rooms are not, and choosing between them is a decision we would rather you made now.

What we can actually do

• Tell you honestly which room is quietest on the night you are coming, before you book, if you telephone and ask.
• Move you to a back room mid-stay if one is free and the front room is not working for you. No charge, and no argument about it.
• Keep earplugs at the desk, free, without anybody having to ask awkwardly.
• Make a front room quiet. We cannot, and a website that implies otherwise is setting up a bad night that ends in an argument at check-out.