The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
House rules
A great villa, a mix of family and friends and a whole lot of sunshine… Either a perfect holiday of communal cooking and free-range kids or a recipe for disaster. Veteran villa host Sasha Slater shares her commandments
What could be better than decamping with a selection of your closest friends and family to a rambling old house in some boiling hot, beautiful and bargainous spot in southern France, Italy or Spain for a week? In your imagination, the seven days stretch ahead in a sun-drenched procession of early morning runs; long, lazy sauvignon-fuelled lunches; river swims; midnight feasts; and time, finally, to talk properly to everyone like you haven’t since you were a student… And the kids will just look after themselves, won’t they? A hotel without the hassle. A home with a better location.
But a break that sounds so simple is actually surprisingly hard to get right. As a host, villa holidaying has its duties and its rules, which you ignore at your peril. And they apply whether you’re holding the fort in a Dorset cottage over a bank-holiday weekend or – I imagine – taking over some ancestral schloss for the ski season. For one reason or another, I’ve been hosting house parties since I was 18. The first was a catastrophe involving Ouija boards and wasp nests. One tempestuous couple threw their bedroom furniture all over the house and broke up. My parents’ most venerable bottles were devoured during a ping-pong drinking game. And I killed their beloved and equally ancient Saab. It was fun while it lasted, though, and didn’t put me off. So here are some hard-learnt lessons from the villa front line.
Choose your guests with care
This is the trickiest bit, of course, and the success of your week away hinges on your selection. Is this holiday going to be all adults slumping on to sunloungers at 11am like basking walruses (but armed with a nice Provençal rosé), while teenagers cavort in the pool? Or is this a yoga retreat for divorcees? Are there under-twos, and if so are they insomniac? Are there party animals who are going to want to explore the nightlife? Is there any nightlife? Are the guests friends with each other? Did any of them have a one-night stand back in the day? (You may not know this yet, but you’ll find out.) Are they Brexit-y or arch Bremoaners? Vegans or foie-gras fanciers? Are they showy-off plutocrats or on a very tight budget? Your best bet – and I’ve learnt this from decades of variously successful and less-spectacular hosting – is to make sure hardly anyone spends the full week, only your most stalwart, relaxed and
useful best friends. If tricky customers are only sticking around for three days, everyone’s going to find them easier to take than if, on a Sunday night, you’re all looking forward to six more evenings of People’s Vote vs no deal. Unknown plus-ones in the form of new boyfriends and girlfriends can be a massive bonus or a disaster, but in the latter event, usually they’re at least entertaining, so welcome them in. And money-wise, if possible you don’t run a kitty, or divvy things up too mathematically. Be generous and rely on your guests to do the same according to their means. If someone goes out of control and insists on beef fillet, they can buy it (and cook it).
Ask for a floor plan and allot bedrooms before you arrive
Oh, the fights you’ll avoid. Keep the sleep fanatics away from the small babies. Put as many children over the age of five together in a bedroom as you can – they won’t get any sleep but they’ll have a lot of fun. Domaine de la Hille, just outside Carcassonne in southern France, which is a test case for the ideal house-party villa, is a jumble of medievalto-19th-century wings all bolted on to each other, with two separate staircases to keep the rival sleep clans apart. There were 18 of us staying there for a week last June, and the house never felt uncomfortably full. I advise you to give yourself the best room – you’re going to earn it. I bagsed the master bedroom at the Domaine, which was about the size of a quarter of a tennis court (I am not exaggerating in the slightest), with rolling acres of cream-coloured carpet, a giant bed and an equally gargantuan bathroom. It made for an excellent retreat when the madness of a houseful of guests got too much.
Get there early
Always factor an extra hour into your drive from airport to house. And never land after about 7pm. You don’t want to be driving down deserted lanes in the backwoods following someone else’s directions and an intermittent satnav in the small hours. And if you’re arriving at a strange, empty house in the dark, you’ll never find the light switches or work out how to turn on the hot water. You’ll hit your head on a low beam and bark a shin on an unexpected step, and you’ll either eat something cold out of a tin or go to bed with rumbling tummies. So get there in daylight and relatively fresh. Or make sure someone else has got there before you. In an ideal world, the person in charge of the house will be there to let you in, show you round briskly and leave. But this is not an ideal world.
It’s mostly about the pool
The swimming pool that any proper villa rental boasts is the first essential. It must be big, warm, and within sight of the house. Too small and you’re basically sharing a bath, and that can be uncomfortable. Too cold and, once your guests have dipped a cautious toe in, they’ll never come back. Grown-ups can be more hardy about this, but a warm pool will keep toddlers happy for hours on end, and a cold one will make them phobic about water for 18 months. My expert on such matters says ‘28C is the temperature that keeps kids in the pool’. As for the location, if getting from your bedroom to your pool entails a 15-minute yomp down a steep slope covered with gorse, you won’t bother to go at all. If it’s right outside the back door (and you can see
Unknown plusones can be a massive bonus or a disaster