Property Description

Fabulous Three-Bedroom Sea-View Villa with Pool, Overlooking Capo d’Orlando on the North Coast of the Nebrodi Park

Villa Manfredi is a huge detached villa overlooking the Gulf of Sant’Agata di Militello, just on the outskirts of Capo d’Orlando on Sicily’s north coast. With dazzling sea views, a private swimming pool and the vast unspoilt beauty of the Nebrodi Natural Park at your back, this is a dream come true for a family who want a luxurious holiday home in Sicily on a mid-range budget.

The villa lies 175m above sea level and just 1800m inland, midway up a steep hillside which faces west. By day the view takes in palm trees, olives groves, a little copse of pines to your right and the fringes of Capo d’Orlando along the shore. Visible on the horizon, on a clear day, are Alicudi and Pecorini, the most westerly of the Aeolian islands. Later on, as the sun dips below the water directly in front of you, you’re in a peerless spot to enjoy Sicily’s legendary sunsets.

The two-storey home is able to be used either all together or as two separate apartments, one on each floor. Each has their own living rooms, kitchen and bathroom. In total three bedrooms can sleep six in complete comfort, and there are three and a bathrooms including an external one by the pool.

The offer also includes a fully fenced plot of land which extends to the front, rear and right side of the villa, and covering over 1,000m2 in total. It’s planted with some lovely Mediterranean trees and there would be every possibility of creating a small vegetable garden.

In excellent condition and perfectly habitable, Villa Manfredi is sold with all the furniture you see in the virtual tour. There couldn’t be a simpler way to pick up a magical second home in the Sicilian sunshine, and at this low price you’d be hard-pushed to find a better-value sea-view villa with pool.

The Property

The villa is painted in warm custard yellow and enjoys a simple design with lovely redwood window shutters and a low-slung, slightly asymmetric roof. A Romanesque balustrade along the front of the terrace gives a subtle suggestion of luxury, and corner cladding in local stone is a nod to the rustic, but otherwise this is an unflashy but stylish modern construction.

A gate leads you off the quiet hillside road onto a flat terrace with crazy paving. There’s plenty of space for car parking or for kids to play ball games. The pool is right on hand, measuring approximately 12 by 4 metres. Directly opposite it, a little pool house is big enough to store all your sun loungers and also contains a bathroom that’s perfect for use while you’re using the pool area.

Terracotta stairs wind upwards to the raised terrace, which wraps right around the house. The garden here is superb, with dwarf palms and colourful trees of many varieties. You’ll find lemons, oranges and olives a banana tree and many ornamental plants.

The main entrance brings you into the original apartment, through a reception room with exposed wooden ceiling and staircase leading back down to the level of the pool and driveway. This is an extension which was added to give indoor access to the lower apartment, a newer development.

Once you pass through the entrance you find yourself in the first living room, a very sunny space with double exposition to the north and, primarily, the west. Here, French windows open onto the deep sea-view terrace that overlooks the pool. You’ll find a long garden table and plenty of external lighting for al fresco dining with an unbeatable panorama in front of you. Back indoors, a kitchen at one end of the living room is fully fitted with a  an oven, gas hob, fridge freezer and extractor fan. A double bedroom gets morning sunshine through its east-facing window and a spacious bathroom has a box shower and double sinks. In total this upper half of the property measures 96m2.

The lower floor is bigger still, and much of this has been given to a wonderful 50m2 living room with sea-view French windows at the far end. On one side is a second kitchen, separated by a breakfast bar in local stone with a marble counter top. The fitted units are this time in light wood and there is everything you found in the upper kitchen. The inviting open space is more than big enough for the dining table and six chairs, as well as the twin leatherette sofas and coffee table which create a lounge area. A second table runs along the north wall next to the French windows, with a charming bench seat.

A large twin bedroom with a pool view and a little en-suite WC is an extremely roomy 23m2. A smaller internal box room is opposite the bottom of the staircase. Completing the floor, a huge family bathroom has a deep corner tub with hydromassage jets and a shower attachment, as well as another matching pair of sinks.

Almost all of the rooms have electric heating and air conditioning, with the temperature controlled by double-glazed PVC windows as well as the external shutters. The floors are in smart, easy to clean ceramic tile throughout.

An LPG (gas) tank is located underground in the garden – you can see photos above. However, although this tank is connected to the house, it’s not currently in use. In theory, it’s designed to produce hot water for the pool and possibly kitchens, but as there is no boiler installed this is not currently in use.

Cold water is drawn from the municipal main and is available without restrictions – not something you can take for granted in Sicily, sadly. A fully certified septic tank receives waste water.

Surroundings

A number of other houses are found along the stretch of hillside that leads to the small village of Naso, but the owners of the neighbouring villas are mostly international buyers who mainly use their properties during the summer months. Not that there’s any reason that Villa Manfredi couldn’t be a year-round home, if you wanted it to be.

The road uphill from the town is paved and in good condition, but the final couple of hundred metres of access road to the villa is quite spartan. It’s fairly steep and unpaved, with some sharp bends. However, it is navigable in any type of vehicle and you won’t have to worry about low temperatures even in the winter!

Once you’re up here you have a real countryside feeling, with so much open space in front of you. The truth though is that the centre of Capo d’Orlando is only ten minutes away by car. The nearest supermarkets are even closer, just six seven minutes away. Capo d’Orlando is a community of about 15,000 people, so you can rely on finding infrastructure for public transport, healthcare and education as well as plenty of shops, restaurants and bars. A new tourist marina was inaugurated in 2017 and this is a really fabulous resource for sailors. It’s about an hour east of Cefalù and the same distance west of Messina.

The Nebrodi Park is a beautiful landscape to explore, with some famous culinary traditions and thee chance to really escape into nature in the raw. The first slopes of Mount Etna begin to rise just 35km to the south.

Sicily’s main cities, Catania and Palermo, are each a little over two hours away. two each. Really, the lack of an immediately accessible airport is the only reason that such a large, beautiful and well-built family home is available to buy at this price. If you want a home you can use for long visits or a permanent relocation, rather than somewhere you can nip down to for a weekend, this is an amazing opportunity.

Potential

You could move into Villa Manfredi right away, especially given the fact that it is sold furnished. It’s absolutely habitable and there’s no need to renovate anything in order to live here.

There are certainly ways in which you could invest a little over the medium term to bring the value up, however. The extension at the upper entrance was not perfectly welded to the original structure and has moved slightly, creating some cracking. This is no kind of risk to the structural integrity of the villa, but it would be nice to fix at some point.

As you’ll have understood when we spoke about the absence of a boiler, there is no central heating system, with the current owners content to use electrical heating from the air conditioning units. Depending on your temperature tolerance and how you plan to use the home, this may well be absolutely fine. You might, though, want to add a small electric water heater as the owners currently heat water for kitchen use in traditional style on the stove!

Adding photovoltaic panels on the roof could greatly reduce your energy bills. Solar powered water heaters could also resolve the issue above in a smart and sustainable fashion, too.

The fact that the sea-view villa with pool can work as twin apartments might open the door to some tourist use, but in truth this is a very traditional area that doesn’t attract large numbers of overseas visitors. We could imagine it, however, as an absolutely perfect shared purchase for two branches of a family or two close families of friends who want to be able to holiday together without ever feeling as though they’re on top of one another or lacking personal space.