Villa Gaya

Villa Gaya is the most generously equipped of the estate's five-bedroom houses, and the one that gives a group the most to do without leaving the property. All five bedrooms have king beds — rare in a villa this size, and worth flagging to groups of couples, who usually have to accept a twin room somewhere in the mix. Four are en-suite, with a further bathroom and a guest toilet, across 454 square metres.

Alongside the nine-by-five-metre private pool there is a cinema room, a rooftop sea-view terrace with a barbecue, and a basketball shooting court shared with its neighbour Villa Daniella. The rooftop is the piece guests remember. It takes the barbecue away from the pool deck and gives the group a second outdoor space entirely, with the sea in front of them and the sunset behind the hills — so an evening can move upstairs rather than everyone staying put around the pool until bed.

The cinema room does similar work at the other end of the day. In the middle of a Samui afternoon, when the sun is unbearable and children have run out of pool, having a cool dark room to disappear into for an hour is worth more than most amenities on a features list.

The kitchen is fully fitted for a group of ten, with a dishwasher, washing machine and dryer, full-size appliances and a Dolce Gusto coffee machine. The interiors are contemporary and light, and the house is laid out for the kind of stay where people cook, spread out across floors and come back together in the evening. The villa's Thai chef can prepare breakfast at 500 THB per person per day, or take the full day at 2,500 THB with guests covering ingredients.

Gaya sits within a gated, government-licensed estate with 24-hour security and its own management and maintenance team on site seven days a week. Guests have complimentary use of the clubhouse and its 24-hour gym, the tennis court by the entrance, and the twice-daily shuttle down to Choeng Mon beach — shallow, calm and genuinely good for young children, with restaurants and a morning market behind it.

Because Villa Daniella sits on the same plot and shares the basketball court, the pair can be taken together by a larger party — nine bedrooms and eighteen guests, each villa with its own pool and kitchen. Multi-family groups of that size are hard to place on Samui, and this is one of the few combinations on the island that answers it inside a single gated estate.