Casadou

Gang Perapen runs off Jalan Pande on the Bingin side of the Bukit, and Casadou announces itself with a small dark plaque half-hidden by heliconia. Behind an arched timber gate the whole plot is one narrow courtyard: a plunge pool of pale turquoise tile set in white pebbles, banana palms and heliconia crowding the walls, a bamboo screen along the top of the render and a run of alang-alang thatch above it for shade. A bamboo ladder leans against the wall doing service as a towel rail. It is thirty square metres of building and not a metre more, which is rather the idea, since everything you might want sits within four steps of the water.

The glass doors fold back and the ground floor becomes part of the courtyard. Inside, a galley kitchenette runs the length of one wall in warm timber under a white counter, with a gas hob, a sink, a fridge, a capsule coffee machine and a strip of light beneath the cupboards. Opposite it a low daybed heaped with fringed linen cushions sits below a macrame hanging on a driftwood rod, a round jute rug and an oval timber table in front of it, and a fluted timber panel with a full-height mirror stretching the room sideways. A white steel stair climbs the corner in two short flights, light enough to disappear.

That stair leads to the only bedroom, a mezzanine tucked under the roof with a king bed against a timber headboard lit by a warm strip and a reading lamp on a swan neck. The balustrade along the open side is white steel hung with macrame, so the room borrows the height of the space below, and a triangular gable window frames a slice of sky above the thatch. Downstairs the bathroom is lined in warm stone tile, with twin rainfall heads behind a glass screen, a terrazzo pedestal basin and a black shelf for the amenities. Air conditioning, a safe, a drying rack and fast Wi-Fi cover the practicalities.

Staff come in daily to clean, and the pool and planting are tended two or three times a week; a welcome drink, towels for the pool and the bathroom, Wi-Fi and a safety box come with the stay, and the concierge handles everything else, from an airport pickup and a scooter to a cook, a massage or a table booked in Uluwatu. Warung Bali Malo is five hundred metres up the lane, Bingin, Dreamland, Impossible and Padang Padang beaches all sit within four or five kilometres, and the airport is eleven. This is a loft for two, and it makes no pretence of being anything larger.

Casadou is a small building that behaves like a much larger one: a courtyard given over almost entirely to water, a room that opens onto it completely, and a bed tucked up under the thatch. For two people who want the Bukit’s beaches by day and somewhere quiet and cool to come back to, the scale is exactly right.