Tamarillo House, Bristol

Great quality accommodation with excellent rooms and fantastic atmosphere. Exceptionally good value for price and the management is fantastic whenever you need them.

Tamarillo is, on the whole, a great place to live and I have already secured my place in the building for another academic year. For those who can afford a studio accommodation, the rooms are generally really well designed. I am a huge fan of my room and its layout and the other ones I have seen look good too. There are a few choices in appliances that I would change, such as removing the microwave oven and replacing this with a proper oven and having slightly more kitchen worktop space, however, these are only minor issues that I can and have easily worked around. The desk, TV, bed, draws and bathroom are all fantastic! The atmosphere of the building is okay but it can often feel very desolate. After spending a lot of time wandering in, out and around the building I find that rarely bump into anyone nor has there been much chance for this to happen either. This is likely down to the pandemic and multiple lockdowns though I suspect. Those people I have met (by random chance) have been lovely, I just wish it would happen more often as the current community ethos feels quite low. The building is very safe, with electronic locks by almost every door and then a classic physical lock for the individual rooms. Not much more they can do here, being honest. The only time such a system can fail is if individual students let people in but this never happens so all is good! Management is surprisingly much better than I expected. The property manager has been very friendly and supportive when I have been in contact with them over the year and it is very clear that they have made a good effort to make me feel valued as an individual rather than one of many students on a spreadsheet. This was incredibly welcoming to see and something I wish other property managers should do more often. My only improvement would be for communication of the company and other staff members on the whole to improve. Often, some information feels like it can come a little late or not at all and/or there are large spells of radio silence during the year. Also, the handling of some (not all) maintenance tickets I have submitted could have been done more efficiently. But generally this is okay too. The location of Tamarillo is, in my opinion, absolutely perfect! No faults at all here. You are close enough to the university of Bristol that walking is no problem at all and the position on Whiteladies Road means you are close enough to the city centre such that you can get there fairly quickly either by foot or bus. Clifton Down Train station sits right outside and connects to Temple Meads fairly quickly, yet I never ever have a problem with noise levels as very few trains pass through it and those that do are slow/quiet. The big Sainsburys is right next door too which makes shopping as easy as it could ever be. For those, like myself, who enjoy exploring the city and walking around the different boroughs/regions of Bristol, this place is also perfect and very central to some fanatic places often unexplored by university students. For those studying at UWE, the bus routes are not the most direct, however, this is still not so bad that it is a problem nor does it detract from the building location. Overall, I think the value is good. Private studio accommodations are, naturally, expensive and as always, there is more that can be done to make it better value but on the whole I think Tamarillo is worth the price. Definitely more so than most of its competitors, no doubt.

Great worth for room and location of place. Only downside is the fact that there’s no kitchen hood but opened windows help with the food smell so it doesn’t linger. Maintenance is very good, immediate response when there’s a problem.