Villa Rental in Kamala, Phuket

What is Kamala like to live in?

Kamala has two floors. Down below, a village with a market, a couple of café streets and a calm beach without waves in high season. Up above, pool villas on the edge of the slope, which are the reason people come.

Views from those houses are among the best on the west coast: the sun sets straight into the bay and the terrace becomes the main room. The price is a steep road to the gate, narrow and unlit in places. This is a village with year-round residents, not a resort front: there is a school, a mosque, a morning market and shops where locals buy, so life is predictable and evenings are quiet.

Send your dates and how you feel about stairs in the chat. We come back with Kamala houses we have visited, up on the slope or down by the beach, and say how far each is from the shops on foot.

Up the slope or down by the beach?

Almost everything depends on the height of the house: the view, the evening temperature, the noise and whether you can walk to the shop. Down along the coast road you find simpler houses on flat plots: no panorama, but walking distance to the beach and no stairs. Up the slope: the bay view, cooler air after sunset and a car you cannot do without. There is little in between, because the slope is steep.

A few gated projects have shared grounds and security, but most houses are stand-alone villas with a pool and garden, from a compact two-bedroom home to a five-bedroom house for families and groups. There are fewer large houses than in Bang Tao, and they go earlier.

Worth knowingOn the slope, 'ten minutes down' becomes twenty-five minutes back up with shopping. You need a car with some power: every rainy season someone fails to get up a wet concrete driveway.

What should you check in a hillside house?

The engineering, before the view. Water pressure on the upper level with the downstairs shower running, a storage tank, drainage on the terraces and how rainwater leaves the plot. In a downpour, poor drainage turns the terrace into a pool and the driveway into a stream.

Then the view itself, on fresh footage. Tropical plants grow fast, and a new neighbour below can close off the panorama in a single season. And noise: the nearby road, building sites, a neighbour's generator. None of it shows in photos; all of it is heard every night.

Low down, the trade-off is the opposite: short distances, flat plots, no stairs, and almost no view. Decide which of the two you want before looking, because the middle of the slope barely exists here.

• Water pressure upstairs, and a storage tank
• Terrace drainage and water off the driveway
• What is being built further down the slope
• The gardener's schedule in the rainy season
• The real walk uphill from the shops
• Number of steps from parking to the door
• Mosquito screens — there is a lot of greenery

What is Kamala beach like?

Wide, calm and gently sloping, which is why families like it. In high season it gets busy, but never the crush you find in Patong. Everyday needs are covered in the village: cafés and restaurants along the beach, a market, shops and pharmacies, so you can go days without driving anywhere.

The pool at home still matters more than it seems. Without regular cleaning, water in the tropics clouds within days, and that is the complaint we hear most often about villas here. We look at the pool and its service schedule at every house we offer, along with the noise: a road nearby, building sites, a neighbour's generator.

From our viewingsA house with a perfect view and a neighbour's generator right under the bedroom window is a real case from Kamala. It is why we visit the house rather than judge it from the owner's photos.

How does Kamala change in low season?

More than its neighbours. Some cafés on the seafront close, the sea turns murky and red flags go up on the beach. The village stays alive, though, because many people live here all year and the basics always work.

Rain rarely lasts all day. The usual pattern is an hour of heavy downpour and then clear skies, but that hour is enough for streams from the slopes to run down the roads. For a hillside house the low season is an honesty test: bad drainage sends water across the terrace and leaves dark patches on the retaining wall, which you can see before you arrive. Ask who clears the driveway and how often the gardener comes in the rains.

Who is Kamala right for?

People who want a calm beach holiday without the isolation of the south: you can spend weeks here without leaving, and Patong is fifteen minutes away if you want it. Families with children, thanks to the gently sloping beach and no night noise, as long as the house is low down or has few steps. Big shopping trips go to Patong or Bang Tao, both within about twenty minutes.

It does not suit anyone after a wide choice of restaurants and nightlife on foot; Bang Tao or Patong fit that better. And it asks for some tolerance of local life: the morning call to prayer carries in the upper village, and music at local festivals runs late. That is not a breach of the peace, it is the normal life of the place.