You planned it.
You should get to be there for it.

First, the reasons not to do this here

We would rather lose the booking than have you find these out in week two of planning.

• Four bathrooms across nine bedrooms. For a group used to a room each with an ensuite, that is the number that decides it. We say it early because it is the thing people discover late.
• The house sleeps up to 28. A celebration built around the people staying works well. One built around a long guest list of people arriving from elsewhere is a different kind of event, and anything with outside guests needs to be agreed in advance — so tell us the shape of the night early rather than late.
• It is a house, not a venue. There is no events team standing by and no back-of-house. What there is instead is a small group of people who live here arranging it, which is better for a dinner for twenty and worse for a production.

What we actually think works

Groups who try to programme every day of a celebration week arrive tired and leave tireder. The ones who get it right do one staged night and leave the rest alone.

The headline night is the one you would have spent three weekends organising: a chef in the house, the long table laid properly, everybody in one place at the same time, and nobody slipping away at eleven because their taxi is here. It is the night the photographs come from. The other days are a beach seven minutes away, a pool, a pool table, and people finding their own pace.

The chefs are not ours — nothing here is except the house. We book them, we brief them on the dietaries you send us, and if one falls through that is our problem rather than a phone call you make on the day.

The bit people forget until it is too late

Everyone arrives at a different time. A birthday group is friends and family flying from four cities on cheap flights, and someone always lands at half past eleven at night. We are twenty minutes from Lisbon airport, which is the difference between that being a nuisance and it being a rearranged evening. Send one arrival list and the transfers get handled with everything else.

And the room allocation is political. Nine bedrooms and fifteen beds do not divide evenly across couples, single friends and the person who snores. We ask before you pay anything — who is a couple, who needs the ground floor, whether the sofa beds are made up — and send back a floor plan with names on it, so the conversation happens on a screen weeks out instead of in the hallway on the first night.

Tell us the occasion, the dates, and roughly how many. If it is not right for your group, we would rather you knew now than in April.

See if your dates are open.