Mareo

A carved timber gate under a shaggy alang-alang canopy, a bougainvillea spilling over the wall beside it, and then Mareo opens straight onto its own courtyard. The pool sits in the middle of it, jade green against pale stone, with a wall of rough-cut limestone running the full length of one side and a built-in bench along it cushioned in wide green and white stripes. A bamboo pergola shades the gate end; banana and heliconia lean in over the water. The house stands two storeys of white lime plaster above all this, tall black-framed arched windows on the upper floor, and it measures barely sixty square metres, which turns out to be exactly enough.

Downstairs is one open room facing the courtyard through a wall of steel and glass. The floor drops into a lounge of built-in plaster seating, low and soft, arranged around a screen set into its own arched niche so that the water is always in the corner of your eye. Behind it a round timber table with cane-backed chairs takes four, and the kitchen closes the room with timber cabinetry, a stone counter and a splashback of textured white plaster that catches the light like coral. Arched alcoves are cut into the walls wherever there is room, holding pots, carvings and a stack of books, and a guest toilet is tucked in beside the stair.

The stair climbs to the bedroom, which takes the entire upper floor. A king sits beneath a panel of fluted timber between plaster niches, and two tall arched windows in black steel open onto a narrow balcony looking over the neighbouring thatched roofs to the trees beyond. Black-out blinds mean the mornings are yours to decide on. The bathroom behind does the villa credit: a deep bath built into a terrazzo surround under its own skylight with brass tapware, twin basins moulded into one long terrazzo slab on a timber cabinet, and a separate rain shower lined in cream zellige tile.

Nowhere to park is the first thing to know about Mareo, and on the Bukit it matters less than it sounds: the concierge meets the flight, and a scooter thereafter covers Bingin’s warungs in four minutes, El Kabron in eight, Padang Padang in nine. Laundry is collected and returned, which it has to be — the villa has no washing machine, and sixty square metres leaves no room for drying racks. The best use of the concierge, though, is a surf lesson in the morning and a therapist in the afternoon: the massage table goes on the stone terrace by the water, with the rough limestone wall holding the day’s heat behind it.

Mareo is a small villa that behaves like a large one, because everything it has points at the same courtyard: the lounge, the dining table, the bedroom windows, the long bench against the stone. Swim before the heat arrives, walk down for coffee, and come back to a pool nobody else is using.