Casa Galicia

The name is lettered straight onto the render beside the gate, under a wrought-iron lantern and a spill of creeper, and inside the door a tiered fountain — curved like a flight of rice terraces — sets the tone before you have seen a single room. Past it the house opens into a double-height courtyard given over almost entirely to a long pool, a bar built into the wall along one side and a timber gallery running the whole way round at first-floor level. Arched openings with carved shutters look down on the water from both storeys, and two swings hang above it. This is a hacienda in the Berawa lanes, built to be lived in by a crowd.

Off the courtyard, doors lead into rooms most villas do not bother with. There is a billiard room, the table set against rough stone with rattan shades hanging low over the baize; a games and library room lined floor to ceiling in reclaimed timber shelving, a carved chess table between two heavy timber armchairs; and an air-conditioned television room where curved green velvet sofas face a screen sunk into a stone wall. Beyond them the half basketball court is painted red and gold under a bull’s head, and the long dining table — fourteen to sixteen places — sits where you can watch a game going on outside while dinner is served.

Seven bedrooms are spread over the two floors, each with a bathroom, a dressing room, a smart television, air conditioning and its own internet line; four have a desk. Six take king beds, some of them two metres across, and the seventh is twinned. The rooms are quieter than the courtyard would suggest: high pitched ceilings with a strip of gold light in the cove, grass-cloth panelling behind the beds, carved shutters, linen in rust and olive. The bathrooms run to long poured vanities under mirrors lit from behind, walk-in rain showers, and in one case walls of olive-green polished plaster.

Ask about a private chef and the fourteen-seat table stops being decorative — that is the arrangement most groups make here, and it leaves the roof free for the part of the evening that matters. Up there a bar counter sits behind a perforated breeze-block screen with a fridge of its own, a stone-clad shower for cooling off between sunbathing, and banquettes facing west across the red clay roofs of Berawa. Inside the gate there is room for two or three cars or twenty scooters. Fourteen guests, seven en-suites and a basketball court make this a house for a large group that means to stay in as often as it goes out.

Casa Galicia works because so much of it happens in one place: the pool is indoors and outdoors at once, the bar is ten steps from the water, and the roof takes over at six. For a group of twelve or fourteen who want Canggu on the doorstep without going out every night, there is not much else like it.