A pool of one’s own: villas and private pools

In Mauritius the word villa covers realities that have almost nothing in common. It describes a single-storey room extended by a plunge pool and a small garden just as readily as a four-bedroom house with a kitchen, a butler and a pool of forty square metres. Between the two lies every shade, and a few figures are enough to tell them apart: the floor area, the size of the pool, its temperature in winter, and the service that comes with it.

Some properties have taken the logic to its conclusion. The Maradiva Villas Resort & Spa, at Flic en Flac, has nothing but villas, 64 in all, single-storey, set on eleven hectares and fronting 750 metres of beach. Each has its own heated pool: fifteen square metres for the one-bedroom villas, twenty-five for the Exclusive villas, fifty-six for the two Presidential villas, which also have their own home cinema and a butler round the clock. Ten pairs of villas connect, which makes it possible to house a large family without giving up privacy.

At Beau Champ, on the east coast, the Four Seasons Resort at Anahita offers only villas and residences, each with its own garden and pool, with 105 to 830 square metres of indoor and outdoor living space. Its four-bedroom Premium residence occupies 510 square metres, on a garden of 1,150 square metres, with a pool of forty-two square metres.

At Pointe aux Piments, The Oberoi has built its villas under traditional thatched roofs. The size of the plot counts as much as that of the house: the villa with private pool occupies 325 square metres of land for 70 square metres indoors, and the three-bedroom royal villa 790 square metres for 225, with a pool sixteen metres long. Many have their own open-air dining pavilion, and the water in the private pools is temperature-controlled during the cooler months.

At the Jadis Beach Resort, in the cove of Turtle Bay at Balaclava, thirty-four units have their own infinity pool, heated to 28°C all year round and treated without chlorine. The beach suites have a pool of 52 square metres and a hammam, and the imperial villa, the only one of its kind, spreads over 1,200 square metres.

Other hotels set aside part of their grounds for villas. At the Constance Prince Maurice, at Poste de Flacq, there are twelve individual thatched villas: nine have direct beach access and a heated private pool, while three are built on stilts above the hotel’s fish reserve, without a pool. At the Constance Belle Mare Plage, eighteen villas with two or three bedrooms, from 375 to 525 square metres, each have their own pool. The Trou aux Biches Beachcomber groups twenty-seven villas into a village at the heart of its gardens, with a private valet for the two- and three-bedroom pool villas. The LUX* Grand Baie has twenty two-bedroom residences with pools, of 180 square metres, and three beach villas with heated pools and butlers.

At Bel Ombre, Heritage The Villas spreads its houses across two hundred hectares of gardens: three-bedroom villas of 180 to 220 square metres, for up to six people, with an infinity pool, a golf buggy, and access to the estate’s two five-star hotels, their restaurants and their beach club.

The private pool is not only for families. Several adults-only hotels have made it a category of its own. The Sunrise Attitude, at Belle Mare, has eight villas of a hundred square metres with a pool and garden. The Tropical Attitude, at Trou d’Eau Douce, has eleven, of sixty square metres, with a pool and a garden of sixteen square metres. The Wonders Beach Boutique Hotel, at Trou aux Biches, has four Garden villas of 75 square metres, each with its own pool, and one villa of 170 square metres that brings two suites together around a single pool.

At the Radisson Blu Azuri, at Roches Noires, nineteen villas of 65 square metres have their own pool, an outdoor shower and a terrace overlooking the mangrove, with butler service. Le Méridien Île Maurice offers sixteen Nirvana Plunge Pool Hideaway suites of 112 square metres, on the ground floor, around a courtyard, with a private plunge pool heated in winter: it is no longer a villa, but the pool is very much there.

Three questions avoid surprises. The first concerns the water: heated or not, all year round or only in the cooler months. The second concerns the view (garden, beach or ocean), for two villas of the same size in the same hotel do not always look out on the same thing. The third concerns service: a butler, in-villa check-in, meals served on the terrace. The villas at Constance Le Chaland, south of Mahébourg, thus have their own butler, a fully equipped kitchen with a wine cellar and in-villa check-in, the largest with four bedrooms over 330 square metres. The price of a villa pays as much for these services as for the square metres.