The simple five-step guide to renting a Villa in Italy or France

Ever thought about renting a villa in Italy, France, Spain or some other European country? Figured that it was hard to do and just for millionaires or film stars? You may be surprised to learn that renting a villa can be more reasonable than staying in a hotel, especially if you are a family or in a larger group (though being a film star or millionaire does help if you want to rent an entire Tuscan village from the Ferragamo family — yes, the shoe people).

Renting a villa doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive; there are just five simple steps.

Step one is to decide if a villa vacation is for you. The pros are that you’ll have a base for a week or two that you can come back to each night. You can stay in all day, lounge by the pool or in the garden, go somewhere, eat in or out… all up to you. The cons are that there’s no daily maid service or other hotel amenities, you are in the same place (so visiting places far from base means a longer round trip), and you have to keep the place reasonably clean and tidy, and do the cooking yourself if you stay in (and clean up afterwards). Personally, I am happy to trade off hotel amenities for a more relaxed and flexible vacation.

Step two is to pick a country and general geography — South of France, Tuscany etc — based on the kind of things you want to do and see. Get a few guidebooks to places you think you might like to go. My personal favorites are the Dorling Kindersley “Eyewitness” travel guides (DK guides), and the Rough Guides. I like the DK guides because they’re chock full of photographs so you can get a much better idea of what a place is really like, and they’re also a good starting point for planning photo-taking days. The Rough Guides are impeccably researched with good writing on places, their history, art and place in contemporary life, with great vignettes on the famous locals. However, although brimming with great maps to get you around. they are sparsely illustrated when it comes to photos.

Step three is to decide whereabouts you want to be — in relation to the places and things you want to see and do. For example, if you really want to spend your days soaking up the world’s greatest collection of renaissance art in Florence, don’t base yourself in a cute-but-remote villa in the rolling hills of Chianti 20 minutes drive from the nearest major road. This point might sound mightily obvious, but to illustrate how wrong it is possible to be, a brief story: one evening my wife and I were enjoying a dinner of incredibly fresh pasta with a great Brunello di Montalcino wine in a small enoteca (wine bar) walking distance from our villa. The place was practically empty, but the owner was friendly and keen to share his knowledge of wine and the chef smiled shyly from her kitchen. Two young American ladies walked in, headed straight to the bar and asked for Martinis, which the owner couldn’t make because he only sells wine. They were fed up having found no “decent” shopping all day. Their villa was in the middle of Chianti, rural and hilly and at least an hour from the nearest Prada store, and they had yet to find the kind of bar that made a good Martini. They would have been far happier in an hotel or apartment in central Florence or Rome — upscale shopping galore and plenty of good international bars.

Step four is to decide on who is going to be your party. Villas work well financially when you can spread the cost out across more people, and farmhouse and country house conversions abound in Tuscany and France. This means there are plenty of villas for rent that can sleep 8, 10, 12 or more. However, you should consider carefully who is going to be vacationing with you — do you really want to spend a week or two with them in the same house? It’s tempting to add friends-of-friends to make up the numbers and keep costs down but consider how well you know these people and whether you’ll get on. A tense atmosphere is the last thing you need on your vacation.

Step five: Armed with the forethought of the first four steps, finding the right villa is far easier. You know where you want to be and what is important to you and your fellow guests, and what size of place you need. Our first villa rental was though ItalianVillas.com, subsequently purchased by the AAA and now part of AAA Travel. They were a great choice for a couple of reasons. First of all, they really knew their stuff: they had been to all the properties they showed on their site and you could call them and talk to someone who could tell you if a property was right for you. Secondly, they were full of good advice on the vagaries of Italian homes that are sometimes surprising and funny to anyone not from Italy. Like the idea that you can’t turn on the heating in September just because it is cold — you must wait until after a certain date in October when the Italian government has decided it’s OK to turn on your heating. So put on a sweater and see if you can find wood for a fire instead! The point is to find an agency that knows its product. Avoid agencies that do not or are just “aggregating” traffic. They are not interested in whether you have a good experience — they’re after the (hefty) commission and on to the next deal.

The only remaining thing to check is the location of the villa, as sites are often vague when it comes to the actual location (”10 minutes from Siena” doesn’t cut it). You need to know this to be sure you won’t be stuck miles from all the things you want to see and do. Find out the name of the village or town nearest to the villa you’re considering. Buy a road map (e.g. Michelin) and/or plug the name into Google Maps and see where it is relative to roads, railways etc. Through the magic of overlaid satellite images, you can also avoid unpleasant surprises, such as renting a pretty villa right next to a large-scale “industrial” farm (this happened to us once, though we didn’t let it ruin our trip).

Advanced villa rental

Renting directly is a substantial cost saving to going through an agency, but you need to know what to look for and what to expect. This is the value that a good agency can bring and why they’re a great idea if you’re new to villa rental. After we had rented twice with ItalianVillas.com we knew enough about what to expect to branch out to other firms and to rent directly from villa owners in Italy, France and Spain. On our second trip to Tuscany we found new places to stay a stone’s throw from our villa — like this:

You might also consider hiring a cook. For some, this immediately conjures images of impossibly expensive executive chefs, but in fact it can cost the same or less than an evening at a nice restaurant depending on the number of people you have.

Last year we rented with friends in Tuscany and asked the owner of the villa to help us find a cook to come 2-3 times a week — and boy, was that the right decision. We have rented several times from the owners, a retired Italian executive couple, and they knew a cook who grew up in a family that owned a restaurant. She was phenomenally good, turning out four course meals of traditional, simple Tuscan cuisine with whatever was freshest and best, all for about 30 Euros a head.

She cooked on the first night when everyone was tired and cranky from a day spent crammed on planes and in seecurity queues, which helped everyone to relax and start to enjoy the vacation. We either cooked ourselves or ate out on the other nights, and having her come by every dew days was a great way to bring everyone together throughout the trip.

So when you’re planning this year’s vacation and have revived yourself after peeking at the dollar exchange rate, consider Villa rental. With a little planning, it can give you relaxing, fulfilling vacations that you’ll remember for a lifetime.

Tags: cook, cooking, europe, food, france, guide, hiring, italy, rental, simple, spain, steps, vacation, villa

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 14:17 (2:17 pm) and is filed under europe, food, france, general, italy, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.