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Booking sites file us under "hotel" because their forms have a limited number of boxes. We aren't one, and you notice on the first evening. 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 all exist. You have to ask for them.

Arriving

Tell 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. 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. It takes about ten minutes, and most of it is the things you'd otherwise work out by trial and error on the first evening.

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 means you have a kitchen. In a city with a market like this one, that starts to matter somewhere around day three.

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 on a trip longer than a week is the appliance that earns its keep. 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.

In practice it means bread, cheese, tomatoes and wine bought on the way home, eaten on the balcony, on the fourth evening when nobody can face another restaurant.

Nobody is watching the front door

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 of the whole arrangement. It does mean that when something breaks at eleven at night, the answer is a phone call. The phone gets answered, and by somebody in this city.

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. Either is fine.

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.