A word of warning to prospective guests; don't expect Historic Stone House to be a B&B, as it is now self-catering accommodation (the hosts are not located on site but are quite responsive to phone calls). My mistake - I read the previous reviews here more thoroughly than their website. The website can also be a little misleading, as the "Rooms/Rates/Facilities" link from the homepage leads to information about a related B&B called Chalet Queenstown.

My husband and I spent four nights in the Alley Apartment, which is a wooden extension to the stone building. It has one bedroom, ensuite bathroom, separate living/dining and a small self-contained kitchen, which seemed to have been installed on the day we arrived. As a result, they were several hours late letting us into the apartment, and we were given a bottle of wine for the inconvenience.

Alley can be rented together with the larger Daniel's Apartment (which we didn't realise when we booked), and there is an interconnecting door between them. I wouldn't have minded, except that there was no lock on our side of the door, so we had to take it on trust that the guests in the other room didn't have access to our rooms. Also the door was thin, with glass panels, and we could hear every word of some conversations between the guests in there. This was unexpected and rather off-putting. If I were the owners I would look at installing an extra, solid door in the corridor between the two apartments and make it lockable from the Alley side.

The rooms were comfortable, a good size, clean and pleasantly decorated. We particularly liked the drapes - the light blocking effect in the bedroom was much appreciated. We also enjoyed the views of the mountains and lake.

The kitchen had all the equipment we needed. The mixer tap over the sink was a little unsteady in its moorings and had a disconcerting tendency to keep running for a few seconds after turning off, but it did provide instant hot water.

The bathroom had a toilet and shower (no bath). The shower worked very well despite having two taps rather than a mixer, but the curtain was not long enough to sit within the shower box so some water would fall from the curtain onto the cork-tiled floor. I would recommend the owners get a longer shower curtain or drop the current one lower by hooking an extra set of curtain rings above the existing ones.

The bedroom provided a reasonably firm king bed with plenty of good bedding including a goosedown duvet and four pillows between us. There was a telephone, robes, slippers, wardrobe with ironing facilities, hairdryers, shelving, and a television in an otherwise empty entertainment cabinet.

There was no remote for the television and when I managed to fix its on/off switch, I found it only had three of the standard six free-to-air channels (and none of the pay channels - fair enough, it wasn't advertised as having that). Given the choice, I'd prefer to have the TV set in the living room rather than the bedroom (since there was only the one). But we hadn't intended to watch much TV on holiday so that wasn't really a problem.

The dining table had rather low sides and I only found it comfortable sitting at either end, otherwise my legs were a bit squashed.

We liked the location; the steep hill walk was not a problem for us although we did walk around a longer gentler slope once or twice to get to the Queenstown Gardens area and from there to the town.

Overall, I don't exactly regret staying there, but if I'd known more about it I probably would have booked elsewhere as it just wasn't quite what I was looking for on this holiday.