Home is most certainly where my heart is. In the summer, I’m to be found at my French mas on the Riviera, writing in the garden overlooking views like these:

In the winter, I nest down in our family home in Kent, a converted rectory surrounded by woodland and gardens and ponds.

Such locations help me to write: quite simply, beautiful scenery and lush colours and sweet, fresh air give me the space and the desire to put pen to paper.

Because location is so important in my own life and in pursuing my passion to write, I am given to infusing my story worlds with amazing settings as well. Within each setting, I seek to create homes for characters that a reader would love to visit, be it heavenly haven or statuesque architectural wonder.

Allow me to take you on a tour of the homes of my romantic worlds:

Mpingo and Whispering Palms, Mombasa

Mpingo…Even the name warmed Coral’s heart like the morning African sun. In Swahili, it meant The Tree of Music, named after the much sought-after dark heartwood used to make wind instruments.

In Burning Embers, home is at the very crux of the story for the heroine, Coral. Her estranged father has died, leaving her his plantation, Mpingo, in his will, and she has decided to return to Kenya, to the home of her childhood, and claim her inheritance. In many ways, the home is reflective of Coral’s emotional journey:

It looked romantically unreal, inviolate, as though set outside time and space… Mpingo! Was it a residence or an edifice, a challenge, an act of folly, or a dream?

Her father had taken a bland, wholly practical construction on the site and revolutionised it into a lavish and beautiful home:

Built on a grand scale, the façade of the new building was of stone — a warm, rich color that evoked the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean, visible from each of the hand-blown, panoramic French windows on the north elevation of the house that gave the rooms a tinted, luminous air. All the windows had brown shutters that could be tightly closed during the monsoon months. The magnificent curved double staircase, the wall paneling, the large ceiling beams, and the floors had all been intricately crafted on site in imported cedar. Outside the rooms on the upper landing, a galleried veranda encircled the house, from where the extensive out-buildings could be seen. Coral remembered peeping through its lacy balustrade as a child of three to watch the gardeners at work, and later, spending lazy afternoons sipping cold lemonade there with her mother while listening to the birdsong and its accompaniment of rustling palms and whispering sea.

Meanwhile, the neighbouring plantation, Whispering Palms, was taken from Coral’s father by businessman Rafe, and while Coral’s initial impression of the home, at night, is of desolation and isolation, come the day she sees that it is quite lovely, with an elegant grandeur devoid of all ostentation, which fits its owner’s personality to perfection. This home has a touch more of the dramatic in its situation:

Built into the hillside, it looked down on the Indian Ocean in the distance across acres of sisal — the perfect place to enjoy panoramic views of stunning sunsets and dramatic storms with the incessant strumming of the cicadas in the background.

Two equally compelling homes; two proud homeowners. Can these new neighbours come to live in harmony side by side? Are Mpingo and Whispering Palms in fact worlds apart? Or, should the two become one…?

Miraggio, Tuscany

In my Italian-set novel The Echoes of Love, the heroine Venetia lives in a quite different home to that of my other heroines. Her home is an apartment, albeit in a beautiful building in Venice, but it lacks the space and dreamy quality of a sprawling home with land and views.

Paolo, conversely, the hero of the book, lives in just such a house: Miraggio, situated in Tuscany. But this isn’t a sweet little country hideaway; it is a magnificent and imposing building built on a plateau that partially juts out over the stormy ocean. This is Paolo’s castle in the clouds, down to the turreted walls, standing tall, proud and aloof, like its owner. Paolo has lovingly rescued the home from dereliction and a tragic past, as a symbol of a new life for him: as he rebuilt the home, so too did he rebuild his life.

When Venetia finds herself falling for Paolo, how will his home affect her? Will she admire its beauty, its situation and its spirit of rebirth? Or will she translate its name, Mirraggio, to the English –mirage – and wonder what is real and what is façade about this place and the man who created it?

El Pavón and L’Estrella, Andalucia

In the first book of my Andalucian Nights trilogy, Indiscretion, Alexandra is in a similar position to Coral in Burning Embers: she is returning to a childhood home from which she has long been absent, in search of a connection to her roots. However, in Alexandra’s case, the home in question is not hers to command as mistress, empty of all family: it is a crowded, bustling home in which live many members of the de Falla family, from her matriarch grandmother down to her spoilt and conniving stepsister and stepmother.

The hacienda itself is impressive, but somewhat austere and imposing, softened only by the verdant gardens and the brilliantly coloured purple bougainvillea that creeps up the whitewashed walls.

The house and its grounds, set in the wild and arid Andalucian countryside, seemed like a flashing jewel thrown on a sandy beach by a giant hand. With its green lawns, colourful shrubs, myriad flowers and tall trees the hacienda had all the grandeur and panache of the peacock, el pavón, after which it had been named.

Can love flourish in a home so focused on appearances? This is a home anyone would be privileged to live in, but is it a happy home? Or is it one from which Alexandra, like her mother before her, will be compelled to flee?

Fast-forward in time a generation, and you meet Alexandra’s daughter, Luz, the heroine of Masquerade. She favours not the ancestral home of El Pavón, but a more bohemian life in the family’s summer house in Cádiz.

They made their way, corkscrewing along the empty cobbled backstreets of Cádiz that snaked uphill to the top of the cliffs. There, L’Estrella lay; the focal point of an enchanting setting, a tiny jewel-like circular house in calm seclusion, halfway between fascinating reality and a mirage. Its whitewashed walls gleamed almost luminous under the full moon and a faint breeze whispered through the cluster of almond trees fringing the entranceway.

The locals had dubbed it ‘the house in the clouds’, because on some moonless nights, when the far-off lights shine from its windows, it seems to be the only bright spot twinkling in the darkness, suspended above the clouds. So the de Rueda family have baptized it L’Estrella, the star.

For Luz, living in a home with the aura of a star makes perfect sense. There she feels free, ‘as if in a magical tower, removed from the cluster of other village houses dotting the cliff further down’. The home embodies the light and the freedom of Luz in the story: this is the 1970s, and Spain is on the cusp of great social change, and Luz can embrace this. But with greater freedom comes greater choice: will Luz choose to be with sophisticated, successful businessman Andrés de Calderón, or free-spirited, passionate gypsy, Leandro?