It started on a beach in the Transkei, before light.

I am Lisa. I grew up in South Africa, where going away together is simply what you do, and where there is an almost unreasonable amount of choice about where to do it. I live in Portugal now.

Most New Year’s mornings of my childhood began in the dark, in a car, driving with my family to a beach in the Transkei. It is the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape: hills that run into the sea, roads that mostly do not. You would arrive with the sky just turning and the whole coast to yourselves. Whatever this is, it started there. Wanting to wake up somewhere quiet, a long way from anything.

The rest I learned on weekends away with friends. Enough of them by now to know what actually makes a house work, and it is never the thing in the photographs. It is whether everyone can be in it all day: one asleep in the shade, one on a lounger with a book, one who has decided, unasked, to cook for eleven people.

Years later we took a new place with a long table under a pergola, built for vines that had not been planted yet. Peak heat, no shade. We hung bedsheets across the beams and weighted them down with packets of sand. Best table of the trip. It is also why I now ask which way a house faces before anything else.

Fifteen years in marketing taught me one useful thing: people can always tell when they are being handled. And I have always loved the whole of a trip, not just the week inside it. The searching, the booking, the first evening when everyone finds the kitchen. Somewhere past the hundredth booking it stopped being a hobby.

Then padel, which arrives the way it always does. Someone needs a fourth, you say yes to be polite, and by Sunday you own two rackets.

Which is how I came to spend the better part of a year looking for one house, for my friends, with a court at it. Weeks of tabs. Courts that turned out to be ten minutes away. Beautiful houses with no court at all. I found it in the end, in the pines above Comporta, and it was worth every wasted evening. It should not have taken that long, and that is the entire reason for this.

So this is those things in one place. Houses chosen the way I would choose one for us, each with a real court at it, and a week that runs the way we would want our own to run.

I go and see it. The court has to be real, on site, and good enough to actually play on. Then I walk the house the way you would on the first afternoon: where the shade falls, whether everyone can be in it at once, what the mornings sound like. If I would not send my own friends, it does not go in.

We are still adding houses. This is the beginning of the collection.

See the collection