Casanova de Ferrando is very special for having so many bedrooms with private bath, but also setting it apart in terms of price-quality are the following: a larger than normal-sized pool, a beautiful landscaped garden (the owners own a tree nursery) with several covered verandahs around the BBQ, all for very resonable rates an excellent location just outside of a small town with shopping & restaurants on the commuter train route to Barcelona, Girona, and beaches! For groups of between 14 to 20 guests, hard to beat!

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• an independent masia (500m2 building with a 6,000m2 garden)
• 9 bedrooms with private bath, 7 with double bed, 2 with single beds, extra beds + cots available
• maximum number of guests: 20
• private fenced-in 12x6 meter pool set in a gorgeous garden
• central heating, satellite TV, video, stereo, 2 refridgerators, dishwasher, washer/dryer, wi-fi internet, etc
• altitude: 65mtrs, 15 quick kms to sea, the house is 3 kms to the C-65 highway
• 2 kms from the village and plenty of shopping and commuter trains to Barcelona, Girona, beaches...
• only 8 kms to PGA Golf at new course at Caldes de Maravella
• current rates: high-season: 3200 Euros/week, mid-season: 2750 Euros/week, low-season: 2100 Euros/week

Intro: the owners of this new house, situated 2 kms outside of Fornells de la Selva, just south of Girona, have done a smart thing. They called me up and invited me to stay at Casanova de Ferrando for a few days to get to know the place first hand. I´m on my third day here, November 21, 2002, and it´s time to get to work and do a proper write up. In general, this newly restored house offers a lot of pros and almost no cons. The owners have restored the house with rentals in mind, so it is one of the few places I offer where all the 9 bedrooms are en suites (nowadays in this business they call any room with a toilet en suite!). But in fact all the rooms here are a of a good size, around 20m2 or more each, and the bathrooms are of a normal size too. Another nice feature is the fact that the common or shared areas, meaning everything aside from the rooms, are well divided into different spaces, so you have several outdoor sitting areas, and indoors: a card room, the small dinning room, a new porch with a huge banquet room (50m2) with seating for over 25 (see new photos of this wooden porch with many windows just below where the text ends), the upstairs hallway table, in addition to large living room. This is very important when you are sharing a house with up to 20 people.

The setting: Casanova is a couple of kilometers outside of Fornells, a sleepy agricultural town with a pharmacy, a tobacconist, two butchers, one of which prepares take delicious take-away dishes like a French traiteur, and a simple but delicious restaurant where I have gone several times now for great 3-course meals and a bottle of wine for 7 Euros! (Charlie adds on October 29, 2003: there is a new terraced restaurant that guests are raving about, and I forgot to mention the Civic Center, which also has good menus for 7 Euros.... but you get the idea. It is a small town with a beautiful old church...) The house is set between a small pitch and putt golf course and a few farms, so the wide views of distant mountain ranges around the house are unobstructed. The owners of Casanova own one of Spain´s most important tree and plant nurseries, so they have practically gone overboard in landscaping a beautiful garden of every imaginable sort of flora in different mediums (I´m not an expert but there are rows of pines and birch, flowerbeds of roses and cyclamens and such, a lilly pond, trellises of climbing plants and ivy, bamboo and citrus, etc., as well as a beautifully kept lawn). There is a large outdoor veranda made of thick tree trunks near the barbecue, and another covered wooden-beamed veranda affixed to the house just outside the living room. This is a house that invites you to spend a lot of time out of doors.

The house
Ground-floor: the front doors open onto a central hallway which distributes traffic throughout the house. On the right as you enter is the second dining room and play room, which seats 12 to 14 at a big wooden table, and has a curious indoor window overlooking part of the main living room. Across the hall is another small dining or sitting room which seats up to 6 at a round table, perfect for card games. Beyond on your right is the kitchen, not very large for such a huge house, but at least well equipped, with dishwasher, microwave, four-burner stove with oven and extractor, toaster, mixer, etc. Around the corner from the kitchen is the main dining room, measuring over 30m2, with one of those long-planked tables seating 20 guests. Separating the kitchen from the large living room is the stairway heading upstairs, and beside that, the downstairs bedroom with king-size double bed and private full bathroom, and a door permitting private direct access to the garden. This room and bathroom is behind a little hallway with a door, so that cuts down on noise from the common rooms. The large 70m2 main living room is four steps down from this main bottom floor level. At the top of the stairs is a bathroom, and at the bottom of the stairs the washroom, with washer and dryer, and a large old-fashioned sink for hand washing.

The large (70m2) living room, as you can see in the photos, is really quite pleasant, and has plenty of natural light from the two windows and 3 double doors allowing direct access to the outdoor floor-tiled and high wooden-beamed veranda, looking out over the garden, BBQ, and pool area. The living room has several sitting areas, two sets of sofa and two lazy chairs, a card table, CD/radio/cassette player, satellite TV, a large fireplace, potted plants, and a mish-mash of decorative items.

The 1st floor is split into two levels with a total of 7 bedrooms, each with private bath. Three steps separate the two wings: one wing, set around a large central room with a small table and chairs, has five rooms in total, 4 rooms with king-size double beds and 1 room with two single beds. (All doubles in this house are large, measuring 150 x 190cm, which I think is very clever on the owner's part). The other wing has two rooms, one with double bed and the other with two single beds. The owners have two fold out beds that can be put into most of the rooms as most rooms are quite spacious. There are also two cots for babies and two high-chairs. All rooms have private bath, all but one of the previously mentioned rooms with walk-in showers, far better, I think, than trying to high-step into a bathtub, but one room does have a bathtub, which is necessary for washing young kids. None of the bathrooms in this house have bidet.

On the top floor there is a large suite with a private anteroom. This is the real thing, a real suite, with a bedroom and a separate living room and full bathroom, all measuring about 70m2, with old fashioned tile floor under the sloped rooftop wooden ceiling beams. This is the room I decided to use during my stay. In fact I just came upstairs to write about this suite more accurately. There are 8 windows up here, each affording lovely views in all directions.

From the sofa in the suite´s anteroom, I am now looking out of the largest window, 1.5 x 1.5 meters, which looks out over some of the owners tree nursery, then the manicured lawns of the pitch and putt golf course, and beyond that, the glorious snow-peaked low-Pyrenees, which must be about 40 kms away. On a clearer day, I suppose you can see layer upon layer of mountain ranges fadding into the distance. This is my favorite view, but there is also a TV set up here with VCR and satellite. The bed in this upstairs suite is in fact two medium sized beds pushed together under a same sheets, and make for a very large and comfortable bed. There is a low twisted cross-beam looking like the yoke for some giant oxen. Watch your heads!

Yes, the owners did a really smart thing in inviting me here. Now, I wonder how they are going to get me to leave!

But wait a second. No house is perfect. So what is wrong with this one? You have to knit pick a bit, but I guess a small portion of the furnishing and decoration is bit, well, for lack of a better word, kitsh. And even in the rooms where all the furnishings are nicely restored antiques, not all the pieces necessarily match. I think I mentioned earlier the term a mish-mash or hodgepodge of furnishings. But this is really knit-picking. This is not something that would bother most people. In fact, most people would find the decoration fun.

What else? The house is set in about 80 meters from a secondary back road into Fornells. Since I arrived I guess averages between 20 or 30 cars passing per day. Some people, I guess, would like to be further away from any road - or not. There is a lot to be said for not having to do any off-road driving! I´m struggling here to find something to complain about, and I haven´t mentioned a lot of good things yet, such as the fact nearby, Fornells de la Selva, only 2 kms away, offers a good selection of shops, restaurants, and even a good caterer that sells prepared meals. Best of all, there is a commuter train station here on the line with frequent trains to Barcelona, Girona, Figueres, and the coast resorts of the northern and southern Costa Brava beaches. Within the house itself it is also worth pointing out that all windows are thick double-glazed, and with a indoor wooden shutter that completely blocks out light and noise for a good nights sleep. There are also a nice collection of indoor potted plants, aspidistras, ficus, and Adams Ribs mostly, which is quite unusual in rental properties, no doubt adding to the homey feel of the place.

All in all, top ratings for this one. Oh, and one last thing: the photos of the house and gardens don´t do justice to the place!