Villa Verona

You come in from the road through a quiet entrance court, and the whole house opens at once: water in the middle, living on one side, bedrooms on the other.

The living side is where the day happens. The living room is sunk three steps into the floor, glazed on two sides and looking straight across the pool. It is the room a group ends up in without anyone deciding to. The dining table sits between it and the kitchen, and the kitchen has an island with a breakfast bar, so whoever is cooking is still part of the evening.

The bedroom side is where it goes quiet. Five bedrooms in a row, all the same size, each with its own bathroom, each with glass doors that slide open onto the deck. Nobody gets the small room at the back, because there isn't one.

And in the middle, the water. The pool is shaped like a lagoon rather than a rectangle, with a shallow end you can sit in and a beach entry that lets you walk in slowly from the deck. The deck runs round it at the same level as the house, so from every room you step out rather than down.

At the far end, a covered outdoor lounge with a bar counter, behind a stone wall and planting.

Everything is on one floor. There is no staircase anywhere in the house.