Villa Aqua

Villa Aqua is the least conventional house on this list. Cubist in form, saturated with colour, with a moat-style pool wrapping the main turret and a palm tree growing up through the double-height living room.

That living room opens to panoramic views. The kitchen carries professional-grade appliances and the dining table seats sixteen, so the house is genuinely built to feed a group rather than to look as though it could.

The garden holds a jacuzzi, a table for eating outside, a wood-fired pizza oven and a sunken trampoline. There is also a gym, a squash court, and a games room with a stocked bar and a lounge pit built around a large screen.

Every bedroom has a bathroom, one of which also serves the pool and gym, and the principal suite has a free-standing tub. Up to eighteen guests.

It sits in Playacar Phase II, roughly a fifteen-minute walk from both the beach and Quinta Avenida.

For a group that wants the house itself to be the entertainment, there is very little competition.