Before you consider renting this holiday house offered by Sykes Cottages, I recommend you think again. My family and I rented this beautifully situated house overlooking St Ives harbour – but the house had big problems and the service offered by Sykes Cottages was completely inadequate. The catalogue of problems included an overwhelming smell of sewage pervading the upper floor which meant that the bathroom could not be used and a gas leak which trickled gas into a bedroom where a 5 year old was sleeping which we, the visitors, had get fixed one night because Sykes failed to answer their emergency ‘out of hours’ service! The owners and/or the Sykes team clearly knew there were noxious smells in their property because there were 13 pots of room reed diffusers strategically placed around the house to mask the stench. In addition the fixtures and fittings hadn’t been looked after which resulted in the nuisance of a broken downstairs toilet seat, leaking coffee machine and two broken hotplates on the hob. I asked for compensation but the answer I received from Sykes was to completely dissociate themselves from the problems and to state that the owners refused to pay. However, Sykes must bear some responsibility for not even running an ‘out of hours’ service.