The Villa Toscana Guest House — Hotel in Lake View Township

I'm super grateful 🙏 that I found this adorable and extremely cozy B & B hidden away from Halsted street. I decided against renewing my apartment lease in Lakeview and I've been a nomad in the Chicagoland area since September 5th staying in various pet friendly hotels within Evanston and Schaumburg. |It was super nice to discover Villa Toscana in my old neighborhood and my pets really enjoyed the ambiance of a home environment instead of a hotel vibe. |This Victorian home 🏡 is extremely cute with beautiful furnishings so my pets felt safe. A sweet pomeranian even greeted my cat and dog and the three interacted beautifully in the living room area. |I chose the wandering room because I have a large pyrenees service dog and I'm so happy I did because both of my fur babies had ample room to sprawl and there was a roll away bed, two cute antique chairs, beautiful lighting, a chandelier, and a very beautiful antique bed with beautiful velvet sheets and an extremely comfortable mattress. |I wasn't extremely thrilled with the cable TV options because it didn't have the channels i normally watch but the room itself exceeded my expectations. |I also had issues with my smartphone wifi because I normally like sleeping with my music selections on YouTube but the wifi here kept competing with my Verizon wireless wifi.|Breakfast is fruit on the countertop, various cereals, bread, pb & j self serve or you're welcome to cook your own breakfast if you bring in groceries. I'm not a breakfast person so I saved my appetite for the Chicago Diner which is a vegan restaurant just a few yards away.|My second night here i accidentally locked myself out of my own room and forgot my room combination code. It was about 5:30 AM and I was absolutely embarrassed but hey stuff happens and it taught me a huge lesson because I had to wake up a guest across the hall from me and he had to wake up Brandon who wasn't even angry at me. Folks if you need to use the bathroom in the middle of the night 🌙 Don't close your door all the way shut and or make sure you don't push in the button from the inside of your room.|Fortunately I was allowed a late check out. I had a ton of things and the extra time was appreciated. If the house hadn't been booked for a private party I would have extended my stay here. Also the bathroom is incredibly clean and there's an antique clawfoot tub to shower or bathe in. I was initially worried about sharing a bathroom with other guests but there weren't a lot of people on my floor and I had the bathroom mostly to myself so it felt private.|All in all the neighborhood is fantastic, the other guests here were super sweet and my dog Troika found a new Friend to play with.|If you need a very reasonably priced B & B in one of the liveliest neighborhoods you should give Tosca...

I regret ignoring the bad reviews I read about this place. We were notified just a few hours before our check in that there would be 15-20 college students filming on the property until 9pm, well after we had to confirm our stay. We get there and the front door is wide open, garbage is everywhere, and the students were apologetic because they didn’t even know people were actually staying on the property. I understood that this would be a self check in place, but it seemed very careless to not make an exception and have at least one staff member on the property when there’s an additional 15-20 students there to make sure things were somewhat clean inside and to ensure the security of the place. The living room and kitchen was packed with people and their food and equipment, our shared bathroom was also being shared with 15-20 other people. Obviously this is a unique situation, but the way it was handled by the staff was very disappointing. The security of the house was a concern of ours and we didn’t really have access to any of the amenities outside of our room so why we were paying the full price we were paying seemed ridiculous (we were not told of the filming crew until after we had confirmed our stay, we would have had a few questions before confirming if we had known beforehand!). The staff member I spoke to on the phone said “well we’re pretty much always booked so we’re not concerned about bad reviews”. Cool, so you guys can laugh at this one! We ended up booking a hotel room last minute because we would have rather wasted hundreds of dollars than stay there with the fear of finding some creep in the shared bathroom in the middle of the night who snuck in because there would have been nothing stopping them...

It's a fully automated check-in. There is nobody on site. It had snowed a little on the day we arrived. After the guy I was with couldn't figure out which room we were supposed to be in, he managed to get someone over to help out. We had gone to the main level of the house, turns out we were supposed to be in the basement. We went back out and I slipped on the slippery slushie stairs and fell. I tried to catch music on the bannister and it broke off in my hand. The guy that had showed up to help find the room offered me ice after I limped downstairs. Aside from explaining that it's all automated, and he should have swept the stairs, nothing else was said about the lack of maintenance that greatly contributed to my slipping on the stairs.

There's is no parking. You get a sticker in your room at check-in to put on your car window then have to go find parking somewhere in the neighborhood. It's described on the website as being secluded, it's not. It's in the middle of a busy district with bars close by. It is set back from the road between two very tall buildings but that's it.

There is no security to speak of aside from the doors that have the automated locks on them. The doors didn't appear to be reinforced.

The room itself was tiny, the bed was really uncomfortable and wedged into a small enclosure just big enough to fit the bed in. You literally have to crawl in and out of bed. The bathroom was bigger than the room. There was no room in the "living space". The floor space was mostly taken up by our suitcases. We left shortly after arriving. Neither of us was...