Casa Shams

Off the Uluwatu road at Pecatu there is a solid timber door in a white wall, a small sign, and a spray of red bougainvillea beside the handle. Push it open and Casa Shams is all there at once: a pale stone courtyard with the house folded around three sides of it and a pool in the middle, its shallow end curving into a broad sitting shelf and a round rendered daybed rising out of the water at the far corner. The walls are whitewashed and softly rounded at every edge, more Andalusian than Balinese, and against them the planting reads sharply — banana, bird-of-paradise, an agave or two, a surfboard leaning where somebody left it. Nyang Nyang Beach and the cliff at Uluwatu Temple are five minutes down the road.

The house is a single level, and the living room runs the full depth of it under a ceiling of pale exposed beams. A low built-in sectional in white linen wraps one corner with a strip of light glowing beneath the seat, facing a smart television and — the detail guests always photograph — a pink portable turntable with a stack of records beside it. Black steel-framed windows look into the planting on the garden side. Through an arch, the kitchen puts a wall of green zellige tile behind the hob and a timber-topped island in front of it, rattan-backed stools drawn up on one side and dinner for six laid on the other. It is a small house that never feels tight, because every room borrows light from the courtyard.

Both bedrooms give onto that courtyard through full-height steel doors, one dressed in olive, the other in sand, each with a proper desk under the window and blackout blinds for the mornings you would rather not see. The bathrooms are the surprise. Each holds a freestanding oval tub on a timber platform with black tapware and a rain shower alongside, and in one of them a giant rattan sunburst mirror takes up most of the wall above the water. Nothing in the villa has a step in it — no stairs anywhere — which matters more than it sounds if you are travelling with a toddler or with parents.

Housekeeping comes through every day and the pool and garden are seen to two or three times a week, which is about the right amount of attention for a house this size. What the concierge is genuinely useful for here is wheels: Uluwatu’s best beaches sit at the bottom of long cliff staircases spread over several kilometres, so a car and a driver who knows the back lanes turns a day of navigating into a day of swimming, and the airport run is a good forty minutes. After that we would book a chef — that green-tiled kitchen deserves better than pasta — and a babysitter for the evening you want to be at Sundays or Ohana without a bedtime. Dinner ends up on the pergola daybed either way.

Casa Shams reads as a holiday house rather than a rental: white walls, timber beams, two deep tubs and a pool you can hear from the pillow. Sixty-one guests have rated it 4.93, and what they keep writing about is not the design but how quiet it is once the door in the wall shuts behind you.