Why I'm asking €1.85m for a four-bedroom villa in Estoi.

The first thing I always say about Vale da Rosa is that it was built to be lived in, not flipped to sell. The architect — who I'll leave unnamed unless and until a buyer signs an NDA — designed it for his own family. Three children, two adults, and a mother-in-law who needed a downstairs suite. He bought the two hectares in 2020, broke ground in 2021, moved in eighteen months later. He has now had eighteen months in it and is leaving for a job in Lisbon.

I have walked the land with him three times. Once before it was on the market, when he was still deciding what to ask. Once with the engineer who signed off the energy certificate. And once with the man who installed the borehole pump. I asked the engineer to tell me, off the record, what corners had been cut. There was a long pause and he said: «None that I can see.»

What it actually is.

Four bedrooms. The master with its own dressing room and bathroom, separated from the others by the entrance hall. A second suite with its own bathroom. A single bedroom with a dressing room. A double bedroom. They share a fourth bathroom. There is also a small guest WC by the entrance for visitors who never need to go further in.

The whole thing is on one floor — single-storey, ground level — except for a studio above the garage, which sits separately and was finished after the rest. It has its own bathroom, its own external entrance via a metal staircase, and its own air-conditioning unit. The architect used it as a writing room. The previous owners used it as a guest flat. The next owners can use it as either.

The living-dining room is sixty square metres in a single open volume, with one wall of 33.1 mm laminated safety glass that opens onto the garden and the pool. The kitchen runs along the back, fully fitted, with a BORA induction hob, a SMEG fan oven, a QUOOKER tap with boiling and sparkling water, a LIEBHERR wine cooler, and a KitchenAid integrated dishwasher. Everything you can see in the photographs comes with the house.

Why Estoi.

Estoi is the village ten minutes east of Faro that the rest of the Algarve hasn't quite noticed yet. It has a Saturday market that has been running since the seventeenth century, a baroque palace converted into a Pousada, and a Roman ruin (Milreu) you can walk to in twenty minutes. The town has just over a thousand inhabitants. It has not been resort-ised.

The villa sits on the CM 1309 — the small municipal road that runs out of the village towards the agricultural land at the foot of the foothills. From the house you can see olive groves, citrus orchards, a couple of greenhouses, and one cypress-lined drive in the middle distance. You cannot see another building. You cannot hear traffic. At night the only light is from the moon and, faintly, Faro on the horizon.

This matters because the rest of inland Algarve has been quietly bought up over the last five years. Estoi has not. The land prices around the village have risen from roughly €40/m² in 2020 to €92–€140/m² in 2026, which is up but a fraction of what's happened in São Brás or Tavira's hinterland. If you are buying for the medium term, the inland-of-Faro band is now where Loulé was four years ago.

The land.

Two hectares is 20,200 m² — 145 metres by 140 metres, more or less. The plot is gently terraced. From the road edge the land rises 6.7 metres to its highest corner; the house sits about two-thirds of the way up, on the long axis. You walk it in about twelve minutes if you do all four sides.

The trees are what the Algarve had before it had villas. Olive throughout — a few of them probably a hundred years old, the rest planted by the previous landowner before they sold the land. Almond and fig in the lower terraces. Two carob and one mature holm oak. A row of cypresses bordering the inner garden line. Dry-stone boundary walls (muros de pedra solta) on three sides, masonry on the road frontage.

The borehole is at the south-west corner, the water tank is mid-plot, and the irrigation system is laid through the olive groves on a timer. Grey water is separated and treated through an ALMAQUA 2000 L compact plant; the architect installed it not because the law required it but because it made the system more resilient. The septic tank for black water is buried at the north-east corner with an evapotranspiration trench beyond it.

The math, in public.

I think prices ought to be worked out in public. The whole industry hides them behind adjectives because the adjectives sell better than the numbers do. I want the buyers we work with to leave a viewing knowing what the three or four cleanest comparable transactions in the area sold for, and how this one stacks up.

For Vale da Rosa, the cleanest comparable on built area I can find is a 280 m² four-bedroom new-build in São Brás de Alportel that sold in February for €1.9m. That puts that one at €6,786/m². Vale da Rosa is asking €7,400 — about 9% higher per built m² — but sits on six times more land. That difference is the trade-off the buyer is making. I think it's a fair trade, but I would, because I'm the agent selling it.

What I don't love.

Two things. First: there is no photovoltaic. The roof has 90 m² of unobstructed south-facing surface, perfect for it, and the architect costed it during the build but decided to defer. He told me he didn't want to specify a system that would be outdated within four years of his moving in. I think that was the wrong call. Adding a 9-kilowatt array with a battery and a hybrid inverter today would cost a buyer €18,000 to €24,000 and would change the energy class from A to A+ once recertified — and would mean the house is genuinely close to off-grid in the summer months.

Second: the studio above the garage and the pool/BBQ area were built but were not included in the 2022 use licence. They were finished after the licence was issued, which is technically a thing that happens often in the Algarve and is rarely an issue, but it does mean the next owner will inherit the regularization paperwork. The cost to put it through is €4,000 to €6,000. I think it should be done before resale, not after.

Everything else on the file is clean. I have published the full set of measurements, the licence numbers, the energy certificate reference and the legal articles on the property page. Open the file and you can read the same paperwork I'm reading.

Who it's for.

Two answers. It was designed for a family of five-plus. Four bedrooms downstairs, a sixty-square-metre living room that absorbs noise, a 13-metre pool with a one-metre beach shelf at the shallow end, an outdoor kitchen, a garage with a table-tennis table, a putting green and a trampoline. The garden is big enough that the children can be lost in it.

The second answer is the one that's been less obvious to people who first see the file. With the children gone — and I say this as someone whose oldest left for university two years ago — the house quietly closes up. Three of the four bedrooms become guest rooms. The studio above the garage runs as a writing room or a yoga studio. The pool cover takes the work out. The energy bill stays small. The borehole stays your own. The two hectares of olive give you enough work and walk to fill an unstructured Algarve day.

I have shown this house to four families and to two couples in their early sixties. They all paused at the same spot — by the live-edge window of the master bedroom, looking south through the olive grove. The couples paused longer.