A Suite Built Around a Single Window

Nine rooms, one courtyard, no lobby to speak of. The house sits a hundred steps above the harbour, close enough that the water is audible at night and far enough that the crowd is not.

Our suite had three pieces of furniture and a window the size of a small car, framing a fig tree and, beneath it, a wedge of the harbour the colour of wet slate. The window was the room. Everything else had been arranged around it, apologetically, as if the designer knew the contest was already lost.

“The window was the room. Everything else had been arranged around it.”

The bed was low and covered in linen that had clearly been washed many times. There was a single lamp, a place to put a book, and a bath deep enough to sit in up to the shoulders. There was no television, and after the first evening we did not miss it.

Breakfast appears in the courtyard: figs from the tree, bread, a soft cheese, coffee that is refilled without being asked. The owners are present but not hovering, which is a distinction a great many hotels never learn.

What makes the house worth its rate is not any single thing it does, but the coherence of all of it. Nothing is out of place, nothing is trying. On the second morning we realised we had stopped noticing the room entirely, which is the highest compliment a room can be paid.