Room for everyone

A house for twelve is not a house for six made bigger. What decides a stay for twelve is almost never the number of beds.

Bathrooms before bedrooms. Twelve people and two shower rooms means a queue every morning and a bad mood by the third day. Four bathrooms for twelve is comfort; three is a minimum; two is a problem no photograph of the pool will fix.

Two living rooms, not one large one. The real luxury of a group house is being able to separate: those reading, those cooking, those putting children to bed. A single hundred-square-metre room, however beautiful, forces everyone onto the same rhythm.

The table. Look at it in the photographs: it should stand where people will actually eat, not laid for the shoot beside a pool where it will be thirty-five degrees at noon. A table for sixteen in the shade, ten paces from the kitchen, beats a table for twenty in full sun.

And sound. Two families under one roof means a child up at seven and adults going to bed at one. Two wings, a whole floor, an outbuilding: ask how the bedrooms are distributed, not only how many there are.