Casa Amici 8

Turn off Jalan Babadan and the gate opens onto water. Casa Amici 8 is built around a long, narrow lap pool set in a courtyard of white rendered arches, with banana palms and heliconia crowding the walls and a parasol tilted over two loungers at the far end. The house wraps the water on two sides, its black-framed glass doors folding back so that the ground floor and the courtyard behave as a single room. Pererenan Beach is six hundred metres away, close enough to hear the surf on a still night, and the lane outside runs down to a strip of cafes that fills up by nine each morning. It is a Mediterranean idea of a Bali villa, and it works.

Inside, the ground floor is one sunken room. A long low sectional runs along two walls beneath a row of arched niches filled with woven discs, carved panels and pale ceramics, facing a smart television and a live-edge timber coffee table. Beyond it the kitchen occupies a stone-topped island with rattan bar stools, and the dining table sits under woven pendants beside an open-tread timber staircase with a black bar balustrade. Cooking here is a real option rather than a gesture, with an oven, a full set of pans, a blender and a freezer, though most guests end up eating on the terrace where the doors fold away and the light moves slowly down the pool.

Three king bedrooms are spread across the two floors, each with its own bathroom, air conditioning and a television, and the finishes repeat pleasingly from room to room: fluted timber vanities on terrazzo, sage-green square tile, brass tapware, arched mirrors. One bathroom is the villa’s quiet luxury, a freestanding oval tub under a skylight set against a full wall of that green tile, deep enough to disappear into after a day in the water. Upstairs a walkway runs along the courtyard, and at its end a slatted timber pergola shades a long built-in banquette with a barbecue counter beside it, which is where the villa moves in the evening as the pool lights come on two floors below.

The barbecue counter beside the upstairs pergola is the one part of this house that rewards a little forethought: ask for a private cook and dinner arrives on that long banquette with the pool lit two floors below, rather than on the courtyard table where you ate lunch. A pool fence is the other sensible call, because the courtyard is the whole of the outdoor space here and the water takes most of it. There is no parking on Jalan Babadan, so a car with a driver beats a hire car, and the same driver makes Tanah Lot an easy morning. Cleaning, pool and garden are the villa staff’s business rather than yours.

Casa Amici 8 has a strong sense of its own geometry: arches, water, and a straight line of pale stone from the gate to the far wall. Days here begin slowly beside the pool and end on the roof with something on the barbecue, and the beach is close enough that the walk never quite gets planned.