Tuscany villas for 10 guests

Two families, one house

Ten guests is usually two families, and the thing that makes those weeks work is not square metres but separation: bedrooms on different floors or in different wings, more than one sitting room, and ideally more than one terrace, so the adults can talk after the children have gone up. When you tell us the shape of the party we match the house to it rather than to the headline number.

Watch the bathroom count and the stairs. Ten people getting ready for dinner needs at least four bathrooms to stay civil, and a ground-floor bedroom is worth a great deal if anyone in the party has knees that object to a fifteenth-century staircase.

The kitchen question

At ten, cooking for the group stops being a holiday activity and becomes a job, which is why most groups this size use the villa cook for two or three nights and a chef for one. That is not an upsell: it is the difference between a week you remember and a week somebody spent shopping. The costs are set out plainly in our villa-with-a-chef guide.