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Booking sites file us under "hotel" because their forms have a limited number of boxes. We're not one, and the difference shows up on your first evening rather than in the listing. There's no front desk to walk up to, no restaurant downstairs, nobody to ring for a towel at midnight. What there is instead is an apartment with its own kitchen, a washing machine, and a person who meets you at the door.

The short version

• No reception, no lobby, no room service. Yehuda meets you at the building with the keys.
• Check-in from 15:00, check-out by 11:00. Tell us your arrival time and we'll be there.
• Every apartment has its own kitchen or kitchenette, air conditioning and a washing machine.
• Breakfasts, laundry, parking, delivery and airport transfers exist, but they're arranged, not assumed.

Arriving

The single thing that makes a self-catering stay go smoothly is telling us when you'll turn up. There's no desk with someone sitting behind it from six in the morning, so arrival is an appointment rather than a queue. Message us the day before with a rough time, and again if your flight slips - the number is the same one on every page of this site, and it takes WhatsApp.

Yehuda meets you at the building. He'll hand over the keys, walk you through the apartment, show you how the air conditioning and the hot water work, and answer the questions you didn't know you had. He speaks English and Hebrew. This takes about ten minutes and it's the part of the stay guests most often say they'd have missed at a hotel, because the person handing you the keys actually knows the building.

Check-in is from 15:00 and check-out is by 11:00. If you land at six in the morning, say so - we can usually do something about bags even when we can't do anything about the apartment.

The kitchen is the point

Self-catering isn't a euphemism for "no breakfast included". It means you have a kitchen, and after two or three days in a city with a market like this one, that turns out to matter more than a buffet.

Every apartment has either a full kitchen or a kitchenette, with a hob, a fridge, a kettle and the pans and crockery to cook a real meal. You get a washing machine, which for anyone travelling more than a week is worth more than most hotel amenities put together. Air conditioning is in every room, not just the bedroom. There's free Wi-Fi throughout, and cable TV with Netflix in several of the units.

What that adds up to is the ability to buy bread, cheese, tomatoes and wine on the way home and eat on your own balcony instead of going out for a fourth night running.

Nobody is watching the front door

This is the part worth being clear about. There's no night porter and no reception desk. You let yourself in and out with your own key, at whatever hour suits you, and nobody logs it.

Most guests describe that as the best part. It does mean that if something breaks at eleven at night, the answer is a phone call rather than a person appearing in the corridor - but the phone is answered, and it's answered by someone who lives in the same city rather than a call centre.

There are 11 apartments in the building and we let 7 of them. The rest are people's homes. You'll pass neighbours on the stairs.

The things you can ask for

Because there's no restaurant and no concierge desk, the extras work by arrangement rather than by menu. All of these exist and none of them happen automatically:

• Hot breakfasts, if you'd rather not shop on your first morning.
• Laundry service, on top of the machine in your apartment.
• Airport transfers, which take the guesswork out of a late-night landing.
• Delivery, for the shop you didn't have time to do.
• On-site parking, at additional cost and subject to availability - Tel Aviv street parking is not a thing to leave to chance.

Ask when you book, or ask Yehuda when he hands you the keys. Neither is too late.

Leaving

Check-out is by 11:00. There's no bill to settle at a desk and no queue to join - you leave the keys as agreed and go. If you have a late flight, ask about leaving bags; the answer is usually yes.

You can see all seven apartments on the accommodation page, and the rates run from USD $180 to $360 a night depending on the season and the size of the unit.