Villa Rosalia

About this property

Los Naranjos sits on the high side of the Nueva Andalucía golf valley, which is the reason houses up there see the sea and the ones further down do not. Villa Rosalia is the largest house in this section: five hundred and eight square metres over three floors, on a plot of eight hundred and seventy three, with five bedrooms and five bathrooms. It is sold fully furnished and the owners have already moved out.

Three floors is unusual here, where a house of this size normally spreads sideways instead. It works because each level has a job. The ground floor is for company, the floor above is for sleeping, and the lower one holds the cinema and the garage. Nobody crosses a bedroom corridor to reach the kitchen, and the terraces stack so that the upper ones look out over the lower ones toward the coast.

The main floor opens through sliding glass onto a terrace wide enough for a dining table and a seating group without either crowding the other. Inside, a long living room with a fireplace at one end runs into the dining room, and behind it the kitchen is dark-fronted and built around an island with seating for four. Underfloor heating runs under the whole house, which on this coast matters for about eight weeks a year and is missed badly during them.

Five bedrooms and five bathrooms. The main bedroom has the sea view and a bathroom with a free-standing bath set against the window. The other four are proper doubles with fitted wardrobes, two of them facing the garden and two the hillside behind.

Downstairs there is a cinema room and secure parking for one car, with two further spaces outside. For a five bedroom house that is tight, and it is worth counting the cars in the family before an offer rather than after. In the garden the pool is set into lawn and lit along its length, and the covered terrace beside it carries a hanging chair that appears in most of the photographs the agency took, so presumably it earns its place.

The urbanisation is gated and quiet, with golf on three sides, international schools inside ten minutes and Puerto Banús about the same. No energy rating and no annual running costs have been published for this house, and both are worth having in hand before the negotiation starts.