The main house

Kai calls the main house “the hub of the place”, which describes it better than a list of rooms would. It holds the big fridge, the kitchen and the larger of the two bathrooms, so through the day it works as the logistical centre of the property: shopping lands here, food gets made here, wet kit gets sorted out here, and people pass through on their way to somewhere else. Most meals are cooked in this kitchen and then carried out to the terrace or the dining area to be eaten, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the property is used.

The honest thing about it is his own line — it is “not really a hang-out place much, thats really ideally outside”. On a good day the house is somewhere you use and the terrace, the pool, the barbecue area and the sauna are where the day actually happens. The main house is built to support that, and it does not try to compete with it.

Two things change that. The first is weather: when it is too cold or too wet to eat outside, everyone ends up in here, and it turns out to be good at exactly that. The sitting room has a proper TV and chill-out corner in the same space as the main bed, so a night indoors becomes dinner and a film instead of a consolation prize. The second is winter, when the stone and the pellet stove make it, in his description, warm and cosy in a way the summer version of the house never needs to be.

The kitchen is the part that earns the word hub. It is a galley: gas hob, oven, a spice rail, an extractor and a window over the work surface, laid out to be cooked in by somebody who is actually cooking. With the big fridge next to it, this is where a week’s food for a full house gets stored and turned into meals, including the ones that get carried out to the terrace and eaten somewhere else entirely.

The larger of the two bathrooms is here as well, which quietly settles a lot of morning logistics when the property is full.

The sitting room is the part that photographs well and lives better: beams overhead, a blue sofa, and the stove standing against stone. The bedroom has a curtained alcove, which is an old solution to an old house and works better than a modern one would. None of it is styled to within an inch of its life, and that is the point — the room reads as somewhere a family has actually lived for years, because it is.

Structurally it is the oldest part of the property: beamed ceilings, and thick stone walls that hold the cool through a Catalan summer. There is air conditioning as well, for the weeks when the stone alone is not enough, and a pellet stove for the months at the other end of the year. There is one proper bedroom, plus a sofa bed in the sitting room that suits a couple of children or a third adult. A smoke alarm is fitted, and a gas alarm in the kitchen for the gas hob. There is a washing machine, for stays of a week or more.

It is also the registered unit, which is a piece of paperwork with a practical consequence: this is the address the property is registered at, and the reason bookings here are handled as one whole place with the guests recorded rather than as rooms let separately. Nothing a guest has to think about, beyond knowing why the booking works the way it does.

One point of expectation, because the layout decides it: the bed and the lounge share a space, so the main house reads as a generous one-bedroom. Groups who want a door between the people sitting up late and the people asleep put somebody in the guesthouse.