Villa Ariza

About this property

Villa Ariza sits in El Rosario, the stretch of Marbella east of the town where the streets are wide, the gardens are forty years old and nothing is built taller than the trees. It is a four bedroom house on a thousand square metre plot, with four hundred and ten metres built across two floors, and it faces south-west, which on this coast is the orientation people pay for. The afternoon sun reaches the terrace and stays there until it goes down behind the hills.

The house is Andalusian rather than contemporary. White walls, a terracotta tile roof, dark wooden shutters and a covered terrace running the width of the building on both floors. Downstairs that terrace is where the house actually lives: it opens off the living room through sliding glass, it is deep enough to be shaded through the middle of the day, and it looks down over the lawn to the pool. Upstairs the same space is repeated off the main bedroom, with a pergola and a daybed.

Inside, the floors are marble throughout the ground level, laid in a checkerboard in the hall and plain in the rooms. The living room runs front to back with a fireplace at one end and the terrace doors at the other. There is a separate dining room off it, which is increasingly unusual in houses built now and makes a difference if you cook for people. The kitchen is white, fitted and functional rather than showy, with its own door to the side of the house.

Four bedrooms and five bathrooms, so nobody shares. The main bedroom takes the better part of the upper floor and opens onto the terrace. The guest rooms are a decent size and two of them look over the garden rather than the road. The bathrooms are marble, in the original specification, and clean enough that you could live with them or change them without urgency.

What El Rosario gives you is ordinariness in the best sense. The beach is a walk rather than a drive. The international schools are five minutes away, which is the reason a lot of families end up in this part of Marbella and stay. Golf is closer still. The town is ten minutes west and Puerto Banús is twenty, so you are near enough to use them and far enough that neither arrives at your gate in August.

The house is lived in and ready. It is not a project, and it is not a new build pretending to be a finca. For a family moving to Marbella properly, rather than buying a lock-up-and-leave, that combination of plot, orientation and location is harder to find each year.