Renting a Villa for a Big Family Group

There is a point at which a family holiday stops being a matter of booking rooms and becomes a matter of choosing a building. Once you are past about eight people - two or three couples, assorted children, a set of grandparents - hotels become both expensive and oddly isolating, and a single villa is almost always better on cost, on food and on the simple business of everyone actually spending time together.

The catch is that villa listings are written to sell the photographs, and the photographs never show the things that decide whether a fortnight works. Bedroom count is the number everyone filters on and very nearly the least useful figure available. What matters is the shape of the place: how far the sleeping is from the living, how many people can sit down at once, and whether there is anywhere to go when you would like ten minutes on your own.

Start with the main gathering space and be honest about its size. A large group lives in one room - the long table, the covered terrace, the kitchen counter - and that space carries breakfast, the wet afternoon, the card games and the evening meal. If it seats eight and you are twelve, someone is permanently on the edge of the group, and with grandparents or small children that someone is usually the same person every day.

Then look for the second and third places to sit. This is the single most reliable predictor of a happy group holiday and almost nobody checks it. A reading corner away from the music, a shaded pavilion at the far end of the garden, a bedroom with an actual chair in it - these are what stop a fortnight of togetherness curdling. Tropical layouts are naturally good at this, because the garden supplies most of the extra rooms at no cost.

Take the kitchen seriously if you intend to eat in at all. A domestic hob and a single fridge cannot feed twelve people twice a day, and groups who discover this on day two end up eating out every night, at several times the cost and rather less fun. Space for two or three to work at once and a fridge that holds a week's shopping changes the rhythm of the whole holiday.

For a three-generation trip the specifics get more particular. At least one bedroom on the ground floor with its own bathroom, for grandparents or anyone who would rather not do stairs at night. Bedrooms with children near their parents rather than at the opposite end of a compound. A pool with a shallow end and, ideally, a gate. And, quietly important, somewhere the early risers can make tea at six without waking the house.

Location does more work than the extra bedroom would. Somewhere within walking distance of a shop, a café and somewhere to swim keeps everyone independent and takes the pressure off whoever ends up driving. That is worth considerably more over a fortnight than a marginally better view, and it is the thing families most often trade away and most often regret.

Where all of it lines up, the format is genuinely hard to beat. One group we know settled on a family compound in Seminyak for exactly these reasons: bedroom wings set apart from the living areas so the children's bedtime did not end everyone else's evening, a kitchen a household cook and the keen amateurs could share, and enough shaded corners in the garden that twelve people could be together all day without ever being on top of one another.

So read the plan before the pictures. Count the seats at the table, count the bathrooms, find the second sitting-out space, check the kitchen and the pool, and work out how far it is to a shop. Those six answers tell you more about how the fortnight will feel than every photograph in the listing put together.