Emerald Villas & Suites

The plan for our first week on Zakynthos was the Peligoni Club, which friends with children rated. But grandparents from both sides were joining us for a week each, and with that much family on the way, the Club's childcare stopped looking worth it. Villas suited us better. Emerald had the first week, when it was just the three of us, and the grandparents came for the second, at Villa Uranos.

What we found was a villa within a hotel. An Emerald Superior is two storeys of stone behind blue shutters, with two bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen below that has a dishwasher and a washing machine, the two appliances a family week actually runs on. Out on the fenced terrace, the pool is 28 square metres and 1.5 metres deep, with a children's pool beside it, so the shallow end has an address of its own. Reed pergolas over the tables lay stripes of shade across the paving, and the brick barbecue stands under the olives. We would book one again, for the privacy of a house with its own kitchen and for the views.

Then there is the hotel half. Rates are room only, so the kitchen earns its keep, but nobody has to cook in it: restaurants deliver meals to the villa and mini markets deliver the shopping. Housekeeping comes in as well. With just the three of us, the deliveries and the cleaning were the really useful part of the arrangement: the house was ours, and most of the housework was not. For an evening out without the child, the concierge can find a babysitter.

Agios Nikolaos, five minutes down the hill, is a small working port with a pebble cove to swim from and the daily ferry over to Pessada on Kefalonia. The two sights most people come to this end of the island for are both reached by sea: the Blue Caves, two miles off, and Navagio, the Shipwreck Beach, five. The concierge will arrange a motor yacht or an open boat for anyone who would rather keep their own timetable than a tour's. Zakynthos Town is a 30 km drive back down the coast, far enough to make dinner a local matter.

The honeymoon suites take the grown-up side of the place, and at the cave suites a daybed sits on the pool's edge beside a curved stone wall with water running down it. The terrace of the Deluxe villas looks straight down on Agios Nikolaos: the harbour with a rocky islet off it, and a line of mountains laid along the far horizon.