The outdoor dining and barbecue area

A covered cook-and-dine terrace off the deck, shared between the two houses: a good Weber, a table that seats six, and enough shade to eat outside for most of the day. It is the practical answer to a compact indoor kitchen, and where a group ends up cooking and eating for most of a stay.

There is more room here than the table suggests. Other tables stand around it, seating for ten goes up without much thought, and the terrace has held parties of fifty and more. That last figure says less about capacity than about how much room there is to spread into.

The thing to do with it, though, is paella. There is a gas ring and a pan for exactly that, and Kai rates the making of it above the eating: “its social, everyone can do some job, it gets very nerdy and the results are usually very good.” Rice, stock, the order things go in, when to stop stirring — an afternoon disappears into it, and it is the closest thing the property has to a group activity that nobody planned.