Casa Embra

The timber door opens on a courtyard that has been planted rather than landscaped. A long green-tiled pool runs the length of it, and the pale stone deck either side is broken by islands from which palms grow straight up past the first-floor balconies. At the far end, an arch of rough cream stone is set into the wall and filled with columnar cacti; bougainvillea comes over the top of it in a pink slab, and vines hang down from the floor above. Everything else is white and square-edged. It is a knowing piece of design, and after two minutes in it you stop noticing the architecture and start noticing the light.

Behind the glass the ground floor is one room, held under a double-height void with a cluster of smoked-glass pendants dropping through it. Cream sofas sit on a graphic black-and-white rug facing a wall-mounted television with Netflix already logged in; an oval table with black cane-back chairs takes the middle; and the kitchen runs along the back behind an island that glows from within its own base, globe pendants on brass rods above it and a wall of warm timber joinery behind. The breakfast bar is where people end up standing. All of it opens to the courtyard, so the pool becomes the fourth wall from mid-morning on.

Four king bedrooms are spread over the two floors and no one of them is the short straw: each has its own bathroom, its own air conditioning and a ceiling fan, and three of the four have tubs. The best of those bathrooms is a long white room with a freestanding oval tub set under black-framed louvred windows and two backlit arched mirrors over a pair of vessel basins. The arch shape repeats in every bathroom, and so does the small potted cactus on each vanity, which is the sort of consistency that tells you one person made all the decisions. Upstairs the bedrooms open to narrow balconies with woven chairs, looking over white rooftops.

Almost everything a stay needs is inside a three-minute walk from the gate: a supermarket, a Circle K, Organicali for breakfast, Dough Darlings for the thing nobody needed, a spa. That is why the service most guests here take up is a bike rather than a car and driver. The concierge covers the rest, a cook for the evenings when that island seems too good to waste, a masseuse, a cot and a pool fence for families, a transfer for the fifty minutes in from the airport. Housekeeping comes daily and the pool and garden are tended two or three times a week. The sand comes off at the outdoor rain shower behind the bamboo screen, before anyone goes back inside.

Eight guests in four equal king suites, with no smallest room to argue over, makes this a straightforward villa for two families or four couples travelling together. The courtyard does the rest of the work: cacti, palms and a long green pool that holds the afternoon light right up until the pendants come on inside.