Casa 24

An arched timber door in a white wall, three steps up from a strip of grass and river pebble, and behind it not one house but three. Casa 24 stands on a quiet Pererenan lane as a run of adjoining villas — two of two bedrooms, one of four — sharing a court of crazy-paving stone with lawn set into it. Each house keeps its own pool. The longest runs beneath a pergola of rough natural timber posts with bougainvillea trained up them and two teak loungers on a raised plinth beside the water. In one corner, under a shaggy thatch awning, a small bar has been built into the wall with stools drawn up to the counter.

Inside, each villa opens the same way: a wall of black steel-framed glass slides right back and the living room and the pool terrace become one floor. Ceilings go up two storeys to exposed timber beams and a black fan, and the seating is sunken — pale built-in banquettes around fluted timber tables on jute rugs, with arched plaster niches cut into the walls for books and ceramics. The kitchens are marble-topped and properly stocked: stove, kettle, blender, coffee machine, wine glasses. In the four-bedroom house the island carries rattan bar stools and a lit shelf runs the wall behind it, and the long dining table sits under rattan pendants beside a round mirror framed in crazy paving.

Eight bedrooms are spread across the three houses and no two are dressed alike. Headboards are either vertical timber ribbing or a rattan-panelled frame with shelving built into its uprights; doors are solid timber under a plaster arch; windows are steel and arched, some of them running up into the double height. Five rooms take a king, two a queen and one a single, and every room has a bathroom of its own. Those carry the same restraint — twin stone basins on rattan-fronted vanities beneath arched mirrors, walls of sage-green tile — and in one, a freestanding oval bath stands against a wall of timber battens with the shower glazed off beside it. The master of the four-bedroom house keeps a hot tub.

Three kitchens is the fact that shapes how you use the place. A private cook works best if you pick one house and everyone eats there, and the bar corner is the obvious spot to hand the drinks out from. With fifteen in the party a car and driver stops being a luxury, particularly after dark on the Pererenan lanes. There is no washing machine anywhere on the estate, so laundry goes through the concierge, and with three unfenced pools a pool fence is worth asking for if small children are coming. Staff clean daily. Beyond that, this suits two families who want their own front doors, or one large group who would rather not queue for a bathroom.

Casa 24 works because the three houses are genuinely separate — separate pools, separate kitchens, separate front doors — while one gate closes on all of them at once. Seseh sand is nine hundred metres away, Pererenan Beach a quarter of an hour on foot, and the coffee at Kadoya is closer than either of them.