Seaside Maisonette Felicitas is a two-storey house in the second row of Toroni, done in white with sea-green shutters and doors, patterned tiles behind the kitchen counter and a marble stair running up through the middle of it. The ground floor is a single open room — kitchen at one end, sofa and dining table at the other — and upstairs are two bedrooms, one with a double bed, one with a bunk that takes three. A bathroom on each floor means nobody queues in the morning. Seven guests in total.

Most of the day happens outside. A covered veranda runs along the side of the house with a wooden table for four, deep enough to stay shaded through the afternoon, and both upstairs bedrooms open onto their own balcony above the garden. There is a small table for two by the front door for coffee before anyone else is awake. The outlook is trees and neighbouring gardens rather than sea.

Toroni is one of the gentler corners of Sithonia: a 2.5-kilometre sweep of sand where the water stays shallow far out and the bay is sheltered enough that the sea is usually flat, which is why the same families come back to it year after year. At the southern end of the beach, a rocky headland holds the ruins of Lekythos castle and the ancient city of Toroni — a serious naval town in Thucydides' day, and the walls of its harbour are still visible a few metres underwater, close enough to swim out to with a mask. Fishing boats moor in the same bay they always have. Porto Koufo, the deepest natural harbour in Greece and the best place on the peninsula to eat fish, is a short drive south, and Neos Marmaras is 21 km up the coast.