It is a bit challenging to write this review. There are some excellent things, but also a few issues that keep this place from being a five star house.
First, some of the excellent things:
- The house is very close (2 minute walk) to a very nice beach and we love the north shore of Kauai. It is lush and beautiful.
- The kitchen is well stocked, although we found the main frying pan (which is not non-stick) very hard to clean.
- The rooms, including the bedrooms, were large and the furniture / beds were comfortable. The second building with two of the bedrooms was very nice and well equipped.
- There were lots of fans
- There was more equipment for the beach than you could ever ask for. Chairs, coolers, bogey boards, large stand up paddle boards, water shoes, snorkeling gear, lots of towels, ... It was everything we could ask for and more. It was like a candy store for our kids
- The front porch is very nice and you can feel the ocean breezes (note that because of the reef, which results in good snorkeling on Anini beach, causes the waves the break far out from shore. Therefore, you don't "hear" the ocean waves breaking on the shore, even though the ocean is so close to the house
- It was very clean
- the local support people were very responsive, even on a Sunday.
There were a number of things that were less positive:
- None of the screen doors had latches and the front door screen would not even stay closed.
- there were no instructions for the dishwasher (we never got it to work)
- the first impression of the house is poor, the tiles on the back porch are very worn and paint needs touch up on the back stairs and then when we walked into the house it was very hot.
- The refrigerator is very slow producing ice. We ended up buying bags of ice because it didn't produce enough ice for a large group
- Even with lots of fans running, trying to circulate the outside air into the big main room of the house, it was warm during the day (hotter than it was outside). This might not be an issue at other times of the year, but was a issue for us in the middle of the summer when we were there.
- The partial ocean view, is very partial. You get small glimpses through the foliage.
The driveway is quite narrow and a bit of a challenge to back up in because of the lush foliage (particularly in the vans we had rented)
In many ways this is a great house, but as discussed above there are some annoying details that didn't really meet our expectations, particularly given the price point.
One small additional detail that people might find helpful. The beach is much smaller, but does not entirely disappear, at high tide. So playing on the beach is a little more limited at high tide, but we also found that snorkeling was better at high tide (the water was actually a little shallow for snorkeling at low tide)