Highlights
- Four bedrooms, four bathrooms, sleeps eight
- Rammed earth walls, roughly half a metre thick
- Enclosed courtyard, usable when the wind blows
- Roof room with a shaded sleeping platform
- Open fire in the main salon
Plan and materials
The courtyard is the organising idea. Rooms open onto it, not outwards, which is why the house stays usable on days when the wind comes down off the mountains and everyone else retreats indoors. Walls are rammed earth, close to half a metre thick; ceilings are eucalyptus poles and reed, laid the old way. Colour comes from the earth itself: ochre, dark red, the grey of the local stone. Four bedrooms, four bathrooms, eight guests, and no room that feels like an afterthought.
Living in it
Two bedrooms sit at ground level off the courtyard; the other two are up a stair at the far end, so a group of eight splits across two levels and nobody sleeps next to everybody. The salon has a proper open fire, and in December that matters — nights on this road are cold. A hammam and a small cold plunge take one corner of the ground floor. The courtyard pool is about twelve metres by four, more for cooling off than for swimming lengths.
Kitchen and table
The kitchen is domestic in scale, built around a wood-fired oven and a long table. Cooking in a house like this is usually done by someone brought in for the week, and the room is wide enough that people stand about in it instead of clearing out.
Amenities
- Courtyard pool, roughly twelve metres by four
- Hammam and cold plunge on the ground floor
- Wood fires in the salon and two bedrooms
- Shaded roof room, used mostly in the evening
- Underfloor heating downstairs
- Wi-fi throughout, strongest around the courtyard
Ideal for
Available on request
- Cook and kitchen staff
- Hammam scrub and massage therapist
- Guided walking in the valley
- Cookery lessons at the wood oven
- Airport transfers
Charged separately from the stay and confirmed case by case.
Gallery
The area
This stretch of road is farmland more than anything else — citrus under net, olive terraces, a few smallholdings selling what they grow at the gate. It sits high enough that the air changes in the evening, and in winter the peaks above the valley hold snow. There is little in the way of restaurants or shops within easy reach, so a week on this road is usually built around eating in.
What the photos won't tell you
Every listing in the world photographs the pool from its best corner, and no photograph answers the questions that decide a stay. So before you commit, we put the following in writing for your dates:
- How far the car gets, and how many metres and steps remain with the luggage.
- Who the neighbours are, and what you will hear at five in the morning.
- Whether the pool is heated, and in which months that decides whether you swim.
- What “staffed” covers — who is there, at what hours, and who cooks.
- Where the wifi actually reaches, not just where the router is.
- Which of the property’s own photographs were taken with a wide-angle lens, and what a room looks like from the doorway.
Common questions
Is the house cold in winter?
Earth walls hold temperature; they do not generate it, so the house runs cool. There is underfloor heating on the ground floor and open fires in the salon and two of the four bedrooms, which is normally enough from December through February with the doors kept shut.
Does the courtyard get any sun?
Yes, through the middle of the day. The walls are high, so mornings and late afternoons in the courtyard are shaded, which is the reason the roof room exists — it catches the last of the sun when the courtyard has already gone cool.
Does the layout work with children?
It can, though the house was not laid out with children in mind: there is a stair without a gate, a hammam, and level changes around the courtyard. Families with young children are usually better suited to a house built on this road for the purpose.
How does the hammam work?
It is a traditional wet room, heated for use and not left on. A hammam of this kind is normally fired a few hours ahead by whoever is running the house, so it wants some planning into the day. A therapist for scrubs and massage is usually available with notice.
Request this stay
Tell us your dates and how many of you there are. A person reads it and answers.