The Field
House
Żurrieq, Malta. Three hundred square metres of limestone and glass, standing alone in the fields two kilometres from the runway.
€20,000
from, five nights, for ten
Żurrieq, Malta. Three hundred square metres of limestone and glass, standing alone in the fields two kilometres from the runway.
Five double bedrooms, arranged around a living room that rises the full height of the house and opens its entire southern wall onto the terrace.
The pool lies outside, long and rectangular, cut into the lawn behind a limestone deck with slatted cabanas shading the beds along its edge. Indoors there is a sauna and a hot tub, which is what makes the house work in February as well as in July.
Beyond the terrace the lawn runs unbroken to the boundary wall — room for twenty to eat outside, or for nobody to be within earshot of anybody else. Showers are set into the stone flank of the house, where you come in from the pool.
That is not a figure of speech: the estate is two villas run together into one. One half is raw Maltese limestone — a living room two storeys high with a timber-slatted ceiling, a mezzanine running across it, and a vaulted passage of bare stone leading through to the kitchen. The other half is marble, glass and a black spiral stair, lit from a long skylight. They meet in the middle and the join is the best thing in the building.
The first is a lap pool under a skylight, in smooth plaster and travertine, behind a perforated wall that drops coins of light onto the surface all afternoon. The second sits in a vaulted room of bare stone with a timber ceiling, cooler and darker, with a door that opens straight onto the terrace. Both are heated, so neither depends on the weather — which on this island matters from November to March.
Five double rooms. The bathrooms are not down a corridor — they open straight off the bedrooms behind glass, and one of them has a black tub set in front of a window that holds nothing but fields and sky.
Not by the night, and never by the room. Five nights is the shortest stay we take, because below that a house like this stops being worth the journey — the pools, the kitchen, the long lunch that turns into the evening, the day you give up and drive to Gozo. It is also what keeps the rate where it is: one arrival, one departure, one clean.
Five nights, the whole house
Ten guests across five double rooms.
€2,000 each for the five nights.
€400 each a night, with the four pools, the sauna and the lawn in it.
About what a good hotel room costs on this island, and you get the house to yourselves.
Stay longer and the nightly figure does not change. Pick your dates below and the total appears as you go.
A village in the south of Malta, at the line where the island stops being a city and turns back into fields. The house stands on its own among farmland, on a lane of old farmhouses.
The airport is two kilometres off. You land, and twenty minutes later you are in the water — which on a Friday night flight with children is worth more than any view. Valletta is eleven kilometres north.
The Blue Grotto is at Wied iż-Żurrieq below the village, best in the morning, with boats from the harbour. Ĩaġar Qim is six kilometres, the Ĩal Saflieni Hypogeum seven, and the Xarolla windmill of 1724 still turns in the village itself. The nearest beach is Birżebbuġa, four kilometres.
The circle covers the area, not the house. The address and the gate code follow once the booking is confirmed.
Pick the nights, see the total, send it. No account, no waiting on a quote, and no fees appearing later — the figure you see is the figure you transfer.