Private villas and residences

A villa has no front desk. There is nobody to ask, no lobby to stand in and no uniform to look for. There is a key, a person who may or may not be there to hand it over, and then a house full of things that either work or do not.

So the whole of the service becomes anticipation. Everything a hotel would answer at a desk has to have been decided before the guest arrived: where the switches are, how the pool heating works, what happens when a bulb goes at nine at night, whether the fridge holds anything at all on the first evening, who to telephone and whether they answer it. Every unanswered question is a small failure of the same kind, and they accumulate quietly across a week.

And where there is staff — a chef, a housekeeper, a caretaker who lives on the property — the guest has to work out how much of the house is actually theirs, and nobody ever tells them. That negotiation is invisible to an owner and central to the stay.

• Villa owners and agents whose guests pay suite rates for a house with nobody at the door.
• Anyone whose property is let through several agents and presented differently by each of them.
• Owners who have never arrived at their own house as a stranger with a suitcase and no instructions.

• What the handover actually gave a guest, and what it quietly left them to work out.
• Which questions the house answered by itself, and which needed a telephone call to somebody.
• How a request made in the evening was handled, and how long it took to be handled.
• Whether the presence of staff read as service or as supervision.