Downtown/SOCO Carriage House with WiFi, Pool, Spa, Gardens and Parking

My now-husband and I stayed in the Carriage House for nearly a week after our wedding – a trip that we called our “mini-moon” as we hope to take our big European honeymoon sometime next year. This place was perfectly suited for our getaway from Boston to Austin. The Carriage House is new, clean, and well-stocked (e.g., basic cookware and utensils, laundry and cleaning supplies). The latter part probably sounds weird (who cooks and cleans on their mini-moon? – apparently, we do).

Not that we did all our own cooking. Wanting to take advantage of the difference in March temperatures between home and Austin, we arranged for a wonderful outdoor meal prepared by Bess. She’s such an amazing, attentive chef; and Blaise is an excellent sous chef!

We also took full advantage of the location and walked to South Congress as well as took the bus into Downtown almost daily. While I can see that people who may want to travel to Barton Springs or other Austin or outside Austin destinations may choose to instead rent a car, we decided to use public transportation (much like we do at home) and the bus conveniently stops directly in front of the main house.

Bess and Blaise were generous with their time and available to answer questions about transportation, what sights to see, etc.

We would absolutely go back and stay at the Carriage House or one of the three beautifully decorated rooms at the Gateway Guesthouse.

The ladies who run this place were fantastic, very welcoming and prepared to go above and beyond to make our stay great. The place itself is excellent, very private, brand new and well-equipped. The couple of very small complaints we had were taken on board and acted on. Someone has a garage full of tools and equipment underneath the apartment which created a bit of annoying noise occasionally but was generally fine. Location is excellent, very close to downtown and great proximity to I35. Couple of things to be wary of are the lack of full separation between lounge/kitchen area and the bedroom, making late night TV watching when your partner wants to sleep a bit tricky. Also the TV is altogether too small for it's placement and the Direct TV menu set up was the most user-unfriendly thing I've seen in the cable world for some time, but you really have to blame Direct TV for that! Generally an excellent stay - we got it at a good price due to it being discounted when we were there which helped.