Every family villa enquiry we get starts out sounding simple, and then somebody’s partner reads the listing properly and the questions begin. Is the pool fenced? Can the pushchair actually get to the front door, or is it forty steps carved into a hillside? Where does the two-year-old sleep if the only cot ends up in the room next to the teenagers who want to be awake until two? We’ve placed enough families over the years to know that the brief looks like an ordinary villa search and then behaves like nothing of the sort.
Here is the thing we’ve learned. Booking for a family isn’t a scaled-up version of booking for a couple, and it certainly isn’t a group-of-friends job with a couple of car seats added on. The whole trip tips on small details that never come up otherwise, and when you get those details right the holiday more or less runs itself. Both Ibiza and Mallorca reward families who choose the villa carefully, so let me walk through how we think about it and point you at a few properties and services that tend to make the difference.
Two islands that were quietly built for families
Ibiza carries a reputation it doesn’t wholly deserve, at least not where families are concerned. Yes, there’s the West End and there’s the superclub calendar, but that is a small and geographically contained corner of the island, and you can spend a fortnight here and never go near it. Drive fifteen minutes out of the airport into the countryside around San Juan and you’re among farmland, fig trees, dry-stone walls and the sort of small sheltered cove where the water is still only at a child’s shins a good thirty metres out. Cala Gracioneta is the classic example, a tiny bay you’d drive straight past if you didn’t know it was there, calm as a bath. Cala Bassa is bigger and busier but shelves just as gently. And when the older ones tire of the sand, the old quarter of Ibiza Town and the Saturday hippy market at Las Dalias will happily swallow an afternoon.
Mallorca is a different proposition, largely because there’s simply more of it, and that range is what makes it such an easy sell to a family who can’t agree on what they actually want. The south has the long flat beaches, and Es Trenc is the one families keep returning to, all soft pale sand and water so shallow you can wander out what feels like fifty metres and still be no deeper than your waist, which is precisely the reassurance a cautious parent is after. Turn north west into the Serra de Tramuntana and it changes character entirely, cooler and green and mountainous, threaded with walking trails and stone villages and, as it happens, horses, which I’ll come back to. A family that fancies a lazy beach morning followed by a proper day out in the hills can manage both here inside the same week, and without much of a drive between the two.
The villa features that actually matter with children
Three things tend to separate a villa that genuinely works for a family from one that simply has the right number of beds.
The first, and the one parents raise before anything else, is the pool, specifically whether it belongs to your party alone and whether it’s enclosed. An open infinity edge photographs beautifully and quietly terrifies anyone travelling with a toddler, whereas a pool with a gate or a low wall around it is the difference between a relaxed week and one spent standing sentry on the terrace. Temperature is worth a thought too, since in early June or late September the sea off both islands can be properly bracing for small bodies, and a heated pool adds a fortnight of usable swimming at either end of the season. Our Heated Pool Villas collection is the quickest route to the ones that have it.
The second is separation, by which I mean layout rather than sheer size. Very few families travel as a neat party of four any more. There’s usually a set of grandparents along for the ride, perhaps an aunt recruited for childcare, sometimes two families splitting the cost and the chaos between them. The villa everyone raves about afterwards is invariably the one where a baby’s afternoon nap doesn’t oblige the whole house to whisper, and where the adults can linger over a bottle of wine without any danger of waking a cot. Our Multi-Generational Estates collection is assembled with exactly that in mind, and where two families would each rather have their own front door, the Neighbouring Estates collection of side-by-side villas tends to solve it more gracefully than one enormous house ever manages.
The third is outdoor space that doesn’t require constant supervision, a patch of flat lawn for a kickabout, somewhere shaded to leave a baby out of the midday glare, a dining terrace roomy enough that nobody has to clamber over a lounger to reach the table.
A few villas that get it right
Over on Ibiza, Villa Idurre (four bedrooms, eight guests, San Juan, from €9,450/week) sits up in the quiet green north with a large pool and open countryside on every side, and it suits the sort of family who would take calm over cachet any day of the week. If a little more room is needed, Can Vicent Deluxe (six bedrooms, 12 guests, Santa Eulalia, from €12,495/week) is a traditional property in the centre of the island with generously proportioned bedrooms and a great deal of outdoor living space to spread a larger group into. And where a heated pool is the detail that clinches it, Casa Ariana Porroig (four bedrooms, eight guests, San José, from €10,125/week) has one, with the sea views to match.
Cross to Mallorca and Can Goyo & Can Gabriela (10 bedrooms across two adjacent villas, 20 guests, Selva, from €11,800/week) is about as good as it gets for two families or three generations who want to holiday together without living in each other’s pockets, since the twin-villa arrangement near Moscari sets a whole building between the early risers and the ones who surface at eleven. For something with more age and character to it, Finca De Casa De Campo (nine bedrooms, 18 guests, Soller, from €24,062/week) is a genuine old Mallorcan finca outside Soller, all weathered stone and high-beamed ceilings, and rambling enough that a child can disappear into it for an entire afternoon.
The bits the concierge takes off your plate
This is really the point at which a Privadia villa stops behaving like an ordinary rental, because we keep our own people on the ground in both islands, and they take on the parts of a family trip that most reliably come unstuck.
Take the food shop, which nobody gives a thought to until they’re stuck doing it. Landing worn out at a villa with an empty fridge and a couple of hungry, overtired children is a wretched way to begin a holiday, so the family can use our grocery delivery to order everything ahead of time, from nappies and formula through to a decent bottle for the grown-ups, and walk in to find the lot delivered, unpacked and stowed in the cupboards. Nobody has to go hunting for a Mercadona on the first afternoon.
Then there’s the boat, which for a fair few families turns out to be the day they all remember. A private charter hands you the pace entirely, so you drop anchor in whichever quiet bay takes your fancy, let the children hurl themselves off the back until they’re thoroughly worn out, and turn for home when the little ones have had their fill rather than when some group excursion decides for you. The team handles the arrangements, and on the larger bookings the boat will frequently collect you close to the villa rather than at a marina half an hour away, which spares everyone that deflating drive before the day has properly begun.
And if there’s a pony-obsessed child in the party, which in my experience there very often is, Mallorca has it covered. The Mallorca concierge can lay on a guided ride through the foothills of the Tramuntana, an unhurried walking-pace amble among the olive groves that is set up for families rather than for people who have been riding since they were six. As often as not it’s the thing the children then describe, in forensic detail, for the whole drive back to the airport.
Placing a family booking
Families are, to be fair, one of the more forgiving briefs to get right once you know which questions to ask, and one of the more painful to get wrong when you don’t. If you’ve a family client weighing up Ibiza or Mallorca for the coming season, the quickest way through it all is to send us the numbers, the ages of the children and a rough sense of what they’re hoping for, either to agents@privadia.com or straight over WhatsApp. What you’ll get back is a shortlist that has already taken account of whether the pool’s enclosed, how the bedrooms divide up and how close the sand is, so you are spared scrolling the entire portfolio trying to work out for yourself which villa happens to have a fence around the water.
