Our St. Augustine Home

Instead of staying at a hotel or B&B, we rented a historical home for our stay.  It is described as "one of 36 surviving colonial structures" in town and is located one block from the main street. The house was built sometime between 1702 and 1764 and was originally a one-storey building.  It is built in what is known as Spanish Colonial style.

I knew we were in the right place when I saw the doorknocker, exactly like the ones I had photographed all over the south of France last year!

The house is very comfortably furnished, with a mix of antique and modern furniture and fixtures.  Here's the living room:

The WIFI signal was strongest in this room, so we tended to check our emails there (as you can see my companions doing in the above photo!).  When we sat in there, you could hear the horse drawn carriages clattering by on the bricked street outside and imagine the occupants of the house hearing the exact same sound two hundred years before.  At night, when we turned off the lights, the streetlights would glow through the old imperfect glass of window panes and reflect on the living room wall, making it look like it was raining outside:

The downstairs hallway is large enough to be a room on its own:

There is also a library room on the ground floor, with a single bed and several tall wooden bookcases that are, sadly, mostly empty at the moment.

The kitchen was definitely modern. We didn't get a chance to try the fireplace but I imagine it would be quite cosy in there with the fire going on a cold night.

Of course, we quickly commandeered the kitchen table for journalling and didn't see the surface of the table again until about an hour before we left at the end of our visit! :)

The original kitchen fireplace is located in what is now the hallway leading to the 2 piece bath and a storage room:

There were 2.5 bathrooms in the house, one on each level.  There were three bedrooms upstairs.  Mine was the size of two rooms, with a king sized bed, a fireplace and lots of closet space:

The other two bedrooms were smaller but just as comfortable, although lacking in closets.  Bedroom 2 was only accessible by walking through either of the other two bedrooms, which was slightly inconvenient but not impossible.

The 3rd floor attic had a full bath and could have accommodated more guests but is currently unused.

The view from up there was quite lovely:

(The tall two-toned building on the right in the above photo is six stories high. Apparently, after it was built, everyone decided it was much too tall and the city rules were quickly amended to ensure that no one else was allowed to build anything that high, so this one building is quite noticeable!)

There is a two storey (newer) carriage house in the back which houses a 3 car garage and storage above.  There is also a small but quite lovely backyard, with a pretty terrace.

All in all, a lovely house. The best part was its location, right in the heart of downtown St. Augustine and within easy walking distance of just about everywhere we wanted to go.