How to Create Mediterranean Outdoor Living at Home (Inspired by a Spanish Villa)

There was exactly one meal we ate inside the villa we stayed at in Calpe last month, and only because a thunderstorm came in over the Peñón de Ifach with about three minutes' warning. The paella was already on the outdoor grill, the four kids were sat at the outside table waiting for their dinner, and the rain started landing on the flagstones before we'd properly registered the sky had changed. My partner grabbed the paella pan, my sister rounded up the children, and we finished the meal around the large dining table upstairs while the rain hammered down outside. Genuinely one of the best meals of the week.

Every other meal that week, we ate outside.

There were eight of us in total: my partner and me, the two children aged five and three, my sister and her husband, and their two children, three and one. The villa had been chosen partly because it could accommodate that mix of adults and small children without anyone needing to whisper, and partly because the outdoor space looked massive on the listing photos. In person, the outdoor space turned out to be the whole point of the place. Inside was lovely (whitewashed walls, beamed ceilings, sea view filling the back windows) but we barely used it. Everything happened outside.

What follows is what worked, what didn't, and what's worth borrowing for a garden back home in Scotland.

The food hub: an outdoor kitchen under shelter

Tucked underneath the upstairs balcony was an open-sided outdoor kitchen with a long wooden counter, two fridges, a sink, a dishwasher, and a hob. Opposite it sat a dining table that fit twelve people comfortably. This became the centre of everything within about a day. We made breakfast there every morning, the kids with their cereal and fruit, the adults working through a slow second coffee while my partner cooked us all french omelettes. We made lunch there every day. The kids got ready for the pool there. My sister fed the baby there. It was, properly, the home hub for the entire week.

It worked because of the shelter. Being tucked underneath the balcony and surrounded by trees meant it stayed shaded by midday and out of the wind that picked up most afternoons. The whole space felt indoor enough to actually use (cool, sheltered, somewhere to put a tray down) but open enough that the pool and the garden and the cicadas were always right there.

Doing something similar at home isn't as wild as it sounds. The idea is a sheltered counter or worktop just outside the back door, somewhere you can chop veg, put a tray down, lean on with a coffee. A solid outdoor kitchen island or freestanding bar unit under a retractable awning gets you most of the way. A small outdoor fridge tucked underneath turns it into something you'll actually use rather than a glorified shelf. If you're doing any garden work already, a built-in counter against a sheltered wall is one of the most useful things you can add, and far more often used than a fancy fire pit. Stick it on whichever side of the house gets your morning sun, and it earns its place from breakfast onwards. Maybe you can't leave clothes on it overnight without them getting soaked, but it's still a start.

The dining table that did everything

Right next to the outdoor kitchen was another dining setup: a long dark-wood table under a massive thatched parasol, surrounded by lemon trees in circular pebble beds. It sat ten comfortably, which mattered when there were eight of us plus stray plates and a high chair wedged in. The view from it was the Peñón de Ifach in the middle distance and the sea behind it. The kind of view you stop noticing on day three and notice again on day seven.

We had dinner there every night except the thunderstorm one. We would all sit down, and eventually the kids peel off to run around the garden, and the adults would stay at the table with the wine. It worked because everything about it was the right size: the table was big enough, the parasol shaded everyone properly, and there was enough overhead lighting that the space just kept getting better as the evening went on rather than slowly dying off the way an unlit garden does at home.

In a smaller garden, the same idea scales fine. A round outdoor dining table with a proper large cantilever parasol (one big enough to actually shade everyone under it, not the small tilting ones from the supermarket that you always regret) will completely change how often you eat outside. A string of festoon lights overhead is the single most underrated addition for outdoor dining at home. It stretches the evening out by another couple of hours in a way nothing else really does.

The outdoor cooking station (and the paella incident)

The proper cooking happened at a separate built-in station across the garden. A whitewashed rendered structure with a wood-fired grill, a chimney rising above it, storage built into the base, flagstones underneath, and (of course) the view of the Peñón de Ifach behind it.

We used it several times that week, mostly for grilled meat and veg, and once for the absurdly ambitious paella that my partner had insisted on attempting despite the weather warnings. It was going beautifully right up until the thunder and lightening storm. The whole operation moved indoors at speed and we finished it on the hob upstairs while the kids watched TV for the first and only time the whole trip. The paella turned out brilliantly, which it had absolutely no right to do under the circumstances.

There's an obvious lesson buried in that paella. The Spanish outdoor cooking station was magnificent but completely open to the sky, which works in Spain about 95% of the time. It doesn't really work here. If you're planning an outdoor cooking setup at home, get some kind of overhead cover sorted, even if it's just a sturdy pergola with a rain-resistant canopy on top. The whole point of cooking outside is to keep doing it once you've started.

A purpose-built outdoor cooking station isn't realistic for most of us at home, but it's worth knowing that block-built BBQs with a rendered finish are far less expensive to commission than the finished result would suggest (apparently around £2,000-4,000). What actually matters is having a proper dedicated cooking spot rather than a kettle BBQ that gets wheeled out and put away each time. A permanent outdoor BBQ or pizza oven on a paved area with a small prep table alongside it changes how often you actually cook outside. The friction of getting set up is what stops most of us doing it more.

The quiet zones: the loggia and the pool

A couple of other spaces deserve a mention, because they were where the rest of the holiday happened. On the front of the guesthouse area was a small whitewashed arched loggia, draped almost entirely in hot pink bougainvillea, with rattan chairs and a striped outdoor rug underneath. It was a great spot to take a quiet minute (and, if I'm honest, an even better spot for drying wet swimwear).

On the other side of the villa was the pool. Kidney-shaped, lined with sun loungers, palm trees at one end for natural shade, and a small thatched pool bar that we'll come back to in a minute. The kids were in the water for hours every day.

The thing to take from this for a garden at home isn't pools or bougainvillea. It's having more than one zone outside, rather than one big patch of lawn with all the furniture on it. A pair of outdoor armchairs in a shaded corner gives you somewhere to sit that isn't the dining table. A garden daybed tucked under a tree creates somewhere for the kids (or you) to disappear to. The whole garden starts to feel like rooms outdoors instead of one big undefined space.

The one thing I'd buy tomorrow (if I had anywhere to put it)

There was one piece of furniture at the villa I want desperately and can't have. It was a Fatboy outdoor rocking lounger, a giant fabric-covered beanbag-style thing you sink into and immediately stop being a useful member of any household. I spent (conservatively) about forty per cent of the holiday in it. The other adults had to take turns on the second one. The kids kept climbing on while I was chillin'.

The problem is I live in Aberdeen. A giant outdoor beanbag isn't going to survive a Scottish winter parked next to the back door, and storing it inside isn't really an answer either, because the thing is the size of an armchair and would take up most of a shed by itself. So it sits firmly on the wishlist, filed under “when I have a covered outdoor pavilion of some sort,” which is realistic for nobody.

If you live somewhere drier than the north-east of Scotland, or you have an outbuilding genuinely big enough to store one in over winter, this is the single piece of outdoor furniture I'd most enthusiastically recommend. Mine remains a daydream.

What I wouldn't bring home with me

Not everything about the villa was great, and the bits that weren't are probably the most useful parts of this post, because they're the things I'd actively avoid copying.

The thatched tiki bar by the pool was lovely to look at and almost completely useless in practice. We never used it. Bar-height seats in full sun very quickly become places where the wine warms up and the glasses get a layer of pollen on them. The seating that actually gets used in any outdoor space is the seating that's shaded and at table or sofa height. A standing-and-leaning counter in the midday sun looks great on a property listing, but just could not be used with children running about.

The bathroom layout was genuinely confusing all week. The villa had several bathrooms, but only one was a conventional toilet-and-sink-in-the-same-room setup. Everywhere else, the sinks had been put in entirely separate rooms from the toilets. Not next door, but across hallways and through other rooms. Washing your hands after the loo involved a small pilgrimage through communal areas. I have no idea why anyone designed it like this, and I cannot recommend it. The lesson is just: when you're planning a bathroom in your own home, keep the basin in the same room as the loo. Sounds obvious. Apparently isn't always.

The biggest issue with the villa, though, was the way the property was spread across multiple buildings and levels. Technically it was one villa with a guest house, but it had been arranged in a way that felt like three separate houses. The main living area and two of the bedrooms were up a flight of grey stone steps, and you couldn't get from upstairs to the downstairs bedrooms without going outside first. With four small children running around, those external stone steps gave me a constant low-level fear that someone was going to come off them at speed.

It also turned the bedroom allocation into a small puzzle. The two largest bedrooms were on the same floor, but we couldn't put the children in them, because it would have meant a baby, two three-year-olds, and a five-year-old all sleeping in what was effectively a separate building, with no way of hearing them. So we took an upstairs room with our three-year-old in the room next to us (she loves a 2am wake-up call), and my sister and her husband took the downstairs room with the baby in a travel cot in the walk-in wardrobe, and the boys in the twin room next door. The adorable cottage villa on the far side stayed empty all week, because it had no space for a cot, and a 2am wake-up call doesn't really lend itself to wandering outside in the dark to investigate a crying toddler.

The wider point goes well beyond this villa. If you're ever designing or extending a family home with small children, how the adult bedrooms relate to the children's bedrooms is one of the most important things to get right. Being able to hear them and get to them quickly when they're small is non-negotiable. You barely notice it when it works and you notice it constantly when it doesn't.

What I'm taking home from it

All that said, the bits of the villa that worked really did work. Sitting at my actual kitchen table in Aberdeen now, looking out at a considerably greyer garden, the thing I keep coming back to is that every space at the villa that had been properly thought through, we used constantly. The spaces that hadn't (the tiki bar, the bewildering bathrooms, the layout that nobody with small children would have designed), we ignored.

It would be easy to look at all of this and feel slightly deflated, given that the British weather is not the Costa Blanca and most of us are not building outdoor kitchens this summer. But the basic idea is doable wherever you live. Work out how you actually want to spend time in your garden, then plan backwards from there. If you eat outside in summer, sort the dining setup properly. If you have your morning coffee outside, give yourself somewhere proper to sit with it. Put a roof over anything that needs to stay dry. And keep the sink in the same room as the loo.

We're already talking about going back next summer.