Holiday home or short-let: what changes in the design

Two commissions arriving with the same sentence — «a country house, three bedrooms, with a pool» — can be two completely different projects. What separates them is neither style nor budget: it is who will be sleeping there, and how often.

A family holiday home gets used thirty or forty nights a year, always by the same people, who leave their things and come back. A short-let house gets used far more nights, by different people every time, who arrive with nothing and leave nothing behind. And past a certain point, the second one stops being a house in the eyes of the law.

The line hardly anyone knows exists: thirty days

It is neither a market convention nor a platform rule. It is a legal definition, and it is written into the law that sets who pays the tourism levy:

Two things sit inside that. First: the threshold is the length of the booking, not the number of guests nor the price. Second, and seldom quoted: there is a presumption of fact against anyone found letting more than one property on those terms. You do not declare yourself a provider; you simply are one, and the burden of showing otherwise flips.

What switches on when you cross that line

The house does not change. What changes is the bundle of duties travelling with it, and they are worth knowing before designing, because three of the five have physical consequences:

• —Active, current registration in the Registro Nacional de Turismo, in place before the first night is sold.
• —Liability insurance covering damage to guests and third parties. The law lists its minimum cover: death, permanent disability, temporary disability, injury, damage to third-party property and medical expenses. It is a duty on tourist accommodation providers, not a broker’s suggestion.
• —A tourism levy of 2.5 per thousand on operating income. That is the rate in force, as worded by the 2023 national development plan act.
• —A guest register. Article 22 obliges accommodation providers to keep one through the Tarjeta de Registro de Alojamiento, on the system the government provides, and that card «is proof of the lodging contract». That implies a place and a moment for checking in: a reception desk, even if it is only a table.
• —Platforms are required to take you down if you have no registration. It is not discretionary: the law orders them not to publish, or to remove, listings from providers without active registration, and makes them answerable to the consumer for misleading advertising if they allow it.

If the house sits inside a condominium

Here lies a trap that has cost litigation: the condominium rules have to authorise that use. It is not enough for tourism law to allow it, nor to hold current registration.

The local plan comes before the design: housing is not lodging

This is the part nearly everyone skips, and the only one that can make a project impossible. On rural land, areas set aside for country housing are a category the local plan delimits expressly, with subdivision rules of their own. Lodging tourists is a different use, and it has a door of its own:

Read it slowly, because it has two halves and the second is rarely quoted. «Anywhere on rural land» is a broad enabling clause. «In accordance with the rules on uses and treatments adopted in the territorial plan» is the condition handing it back to the municipality. It is not a national permission: it is a door the local plan opens or shuts.

What changes in the design

From here on this is this practice’s judgement, drawn from built work and from commissions rather than from code. It is said plainly because no published source backs it, and because the earlier part does have one.

The house stands empty most of the year

It is the condition governing both cases, holiday home and short-let, and the one least often designed for. A closed house is not at rest: it is working on its own.

• —Ventilation has to work with the house shut. In a hot, humid climate, a sealed house grows mould in the places nobody sees within three weeks. High-level vents, a ventilated ridge and wardrobes that breathe are worth more than a dehumidifier nobody switches on.
• —Anything that cannot be shut without a key is surplus. Every point requiring somebody to go and operate it is a point that will fail.
• —Finishes age differently without use. Unventilated timber and unwashed silicone seals degrade faster in an empty house than in a lived-in one.
• —The garden does not wait. In a hot climate, three months without maintenance erase the landscape design. Either there is automatic irrigation and somebody to cut, or the design has to survive neglect.

Water and drainage are sized on the peak

Here the difference between the two houses is arithmetic. The national technical code allots water per person, and the maximum depends on altitude: 140 litres per person per day below 1,000 m a.s.l., 130 between 1,000 and 2,000, and 120 above. A three-bedroom short-let can sleep eight people half the year; the same house as a family retreat sleeps four, for forty nights.

Security: the problem is not the burglar, it is the absence

• —A core that can be locked. A room or store with a key, off the guest route, where the owner’s things live. It is the detail most often asked for afterwards and worst resolved afterwards.
• —Fencing and sightlines before alarms. On a rural plot an alarm summons somebody forty minutes away. Useful deterrence is physical and comes from the siting: how the house is seen, and how it is reached.
• —Power and water with some autonomy. Not a luxury: a three-day outage with nobody there turns a full fridge into a cleaning problem.
• —Entrances are designed around keys that do not exist. Code locks, or a key safe, or somebody in the village with a set. Choosing changes the door, not just the lock.

Maintenance from a distance

• —Everything needing inspection has to be reachable without a ladder. Access chambers, filters, distribution boards and stopcocks, grouped and labelled, or nobody will inspect them.
• —One services panel in one place. When the person going to look is a neighbour rather than a technician, the difference between «shut that valve» and «find the valve» is measured in hours.
• —Separate metering for whatever can leak. A water meter of its own for the pool or the irrigation turns an odd bill into a diagnosis.
• —The maintenance schedule is handed over with the house. What gets checked, how often and by whom. It is the part of the project most appreciated two years later.

And what changes only if it will be let

• —The guest route separates from the house route. Arrival, luggage and departure one way; dirty linen, refuse and storage the other. Where they cross, every turnaround shows it.
• —Bathrooms outrank bedrooms. In a short-let, one bathroom per bedroom stops being a luxury and becomes a condition, and that changes the plumbing and the drainage before it changes the plan.
• —Turnaround finishes, not own-home finishes. Surfaces that clean fast, protected corners, floors that forgive. It is not about making it ugly; it is that cleaning between guests takes two hours, not two days.
• —A kitchen for cooking twice, not a kitchen from a magazine. Fewer appliances, tougher ones, and lockable storage for the owner’s things.
• —Somewhere to receive people and keep the guest register. The law requires the register; the design has to give it a place, even if it is a console by the door.
• —Noise between bedrooms. People who do not know each other sleep worse. Acoustic separation between rooms is the number one complaint and the cheapest thing to prevent on paper.

The pool, which may change category with the use

Worth raising as an open question, because I am not going to settle it here. Ley 1209 defines a private pool as «exclusively the single-family one», and among restricted-use pools it expressly names hotels and holiday centres. A single-family house let by the night to strangers falls at an intermediate point the text does not resolve.

The two houses, side by side

How to order the decision

1. 1Settle the use before the plan. It cannot be left until after the drawings: it changes bathrooms, circulation, drainage and finishes.
2. 2Ask the planning office in writing whether tourist accommodation is permitted in the land category of the plot, and on what conditions.
3. 3In a condominium, read the rules before buying. Rules that do not authorise it are a problem settled at a general meeting, and general meetings keep no calendar.
4. 4Size water and drainage on the real peak guest count, not on the bedroom count.
5. 5Draw the owner’s locked core into the very first sketch. Added later it always ends up as a room without a window.
6. 6If you are going to let, treat registration, insurance and the levy as part of the project, not as later paperwork. Registration comes before the first night.
7. 7And if you are torn between the two, design for short-letting and use it as a holiday home. The reverse route calls for building work.

That last one is the most useful advice in the whole article, and the cheapest: a house designed to receive strangers works perfectly well for receiving family. The other way round it does not. And the decision to let almost never gets taken before building — it gets taken three years later, when it can no longer be put right without demolition.