Why Single-Floor Living Has Become a Deliberate Choice
For a long time, the conversation about one-storey villas in Marbella was framed almost entirely around mobility — older buyers, recovery from surgery, wheelchair access. That framing was always incomplete, and it is becoming less accurate every year.
What we observe at Muse Selection, across both our on-market catalogue and the roughly 300 residences we hold off-market, is a more varied profile. Yes, there are buyers in their sixties and seventies who want a home that works unconditionally — no stairs between the bedroom and the terrace at three in the morning, no question of whether a property will still suit them in ten years. That consideration is real and reasonable. But sitting alongside it are buyers in their forties: people who have owned multi-level homes elsewhere and arrived at a considered preference for horizontal living. An open floor plan that reads as a single continuous space. Morning light that travels from one end of the house to the other without obstruction. The particular quiet of a home where everything occupies the same ground.
This is not a niche. In our working catalogue of approximately 670 deduplicated residences at the €1.5 million threshold and above, properties that present as genuinely single-storey — not split-level, not a ground floor with a utility level below — represent somewhere between 18 and 22 percent of available stock at any given time. That figure fluctuates, but it has not shrunk. The demand side has held steady; the supply side is simply uneven across zones.
Where the Inventory Actually Sits
Not every part of the Costa del Sol lends itself to one-storey construction in the upper residential bracket. Topography matters. Land that rises steeply, as it does in much of Benahavís municipality, tends to produce homes built into hillsides — split over levels by necessity rather than design choice. Land that is broadly flat, or that slopes gently enough to allow a single platform to be cut, is where true single-floor villas concentrate.
The zones where we most consistently find qualifying stock are, in practical terms, three or four clusters. The lower reaches of Nueva Andalucía — the valley floor rather than the slopes above — have historically produced single-storey construction at scale. Plots here are generous enough that a four or five-bedroom footprint can spread laterally without the home feeling compressed. Urbanisations like Los Naranjos and Las Brisas contain a meaningful number of original-build villas from the 1980s and 1990s that were single-storey from the outset, some of which have been modernised in the intervening decades.
The Golden Mile presents differently. Land is more constrained and prices per square metre of plot are higher, which tends to push construction upward rather than outward. Single-storey examples exist but are less common and tend to trade at a premium relative to equivalent footprint on two levels. When they do appear, they move with relatively little time on market.
El Madroñal and the lower parcels of the Benahavís corridor are worth watching. The larger plots here — frequently above 3,000 square metres — allow architects to design horizontally without sacrificing the internal programme. Several of the off-market introductions we have arranged in the past eighteen months have been in this zone, and single-level construction featured as a deliberate brief in more than half of those conversations.
What Accessibility-Led Buyers Are Actually Asking For
The term accessibility tends to trigger a mental image of clinical adaptations — grab rails, ramp gradients, widened doorways. What buyers in this segment are actually describing is more considered than that, and often more architecturally interesting.
The starting point is usually level access from the vehicle to the front door and from the living areas to the pool terrace. In a market where outdoor living is not incidental but central to the value proposition, a step at the threshold between salon and garden is not a small inconvenience. It is a daily friction point that compounds. Buyers who have thought this through want continuity of surface — typically large-format stone or porcelain that flows from inside to outside without a level change, or with a change so slight that it functions equally as a weather seal and a visual joint.
Beyond that, the brief tends to include a master suite that can be entirely self-contained: dressing, bathroom, and direct terrace access all within a single wing. This is partly about mobility, partly about household dynamics. For couples where one partner rises earlier, or where guests are present frequently, a layout that allows the master occupants to move through their morning without intersecting the rest of the house has a straightforward domestic logic.
Kitchen planning in this segment has also shifted. Islands at a height adjustable by the contractor, or simply specified at a seated working height from the outset, appear in more briefs than they did five years ago. These are not adaptations added after the fact. They are being designed in from the beginning, which points to buyers who are thinking about a property's long-term utility rather than its immediate presentation.
The Renovation Question and Original-Build Stock
A significant proportion of single-storey villas on the Costa del Sol were built between 1975 and 2000, when planning regulations in certain zones permitted generous single-level footprints on plots that would not receive the same permissions today. This creates a specific opportunity and a specific risk.
The opportunity is that a well-located original-build single-storey villa — structurally sound, sitting on a large plot in an established urbanisation — can be acquired and comprehensively reformed to a contemporary specification at a combined cost that still represents reasonable value relative to new construction. In Nueva Andalucía, we have seen this pattern repeat with enough consistency that it constitutes a recognisable acquisition strategy rather than an occasional opportunistic purchase.
The risk is twofold. First, older single-storey construction in this climate was frequently built with flat or near-flat roofs, which carry a maintenance history that deserves careful examination. Water ingress over time is not always visible at the point of sale. A building survey by a qualified technical architect — not a general inspector — is non-negotiable. Second, the internal volumes of 1980s construction often feel low by current standards. Ceiling heights of 2.6 metres that felt normal in their era can constrain a renovation if the brief calls for the open, light-filled interior that contemporary buyers expect. The structural implications of raising a roofline need to be understood before a purchase price is agreed.
When the bones are right, though, these properties offer something that new construction in the same zones rarely provides: a footprint and plot ratio that planning authorities would not approve today. That is a form of scarcity that tends to hold value over time.
New Construction and What the Market Is Delivering
For buyers who prefer not to undertake a reform, new single-storey construction at the relevant price point is available but requires patience to identify. Developers working in the Costa del Sol's luxury segment have, for the most part, defaulted to two-storey or villa-plus-basement formats because the mathematics of construction cost per square metre favour building upward. A single-storey villa of 400 interior square metres requires roughly twice the plot footprint of a two-storey villa with the same internal programme, which puts pressure on land acquisition costs.
Developers who have committed to single-storey formats in recent years have typically done so in one of two ways. The first is positioning it as an explicit accessibility feature — marketing to the segment directly, specifying wider corridors, level thresholds, and adapted bathrooms as standard rather than optional. The second is absorbing the land cost premium on plots of sufficient size that the single-level home reads primarily as a design statement rather than a concession to topography, appealing to the broader horizontal-living preference we described at the outset.
In the Sotogrande area, there has been a modest but noticeable increase in new single-storey development at the upper end of the residential market. The terrain in parts of that municipality accommodates it, and the buyer profile — often international, often with experience of single-storey residential architecture in other markets — aligns with the format. It remains a smaller volume of units than demand would comfortably absorb.
What a Methodical Search Looks Like
For a buyer with a firm single-storey requirement and a budget in the range where this article is pitched, the search benefits from being conducted as an active conversation rather than a portal browse. Listing photography and floor plan descriptions are inconsistent on this specific point. A property described as ground floor may have a lower level that the vendor considers storage or utility space but which, in practice, means the structure sits on two levels. The distinction matters if the requirement is genuine.
At Muse Selection, we began formally tagging single-storey status across our catalogue in 2022, initially because we noticed how often the question was arising in client briefs that had not foregrounded it. The result is a filtered view of the market — across both our publicly visible inventory and our introductions — that reflects actual construction format rather than marketing description.
The zones worth prioritising for this search, given current stock depth, are the valley floor of Nueva Andalucía, the lower parcels of El Madroñal, and selected areas of Sotogrande. The Golden Mile repays attention when single-storey properties appear, but the wait between appearances can be considerable.
There is something in the rhythm of a one-storey home that takes a day or two to register properly. The way a morning can move from bed to garden to kitchen and back without a single change in level. Whether that is a practical requirement or an aesthetic one, it is a reasonable thing to want from a house built for long habitation.