Nova Oasis 4

Nova Oasis 4 is reached along a lane rather than off a street: white rendered walls, terrazzo underfoot, palms lit from the ground, and at the end a tall dark timber door with a stone-clad outdoor shower beside it. Through the door the plot opens into a courtyard almost entirely taken up by water — a narrow pool tiled dark green, running the length of the villa, with a cushioned daybed built out over one end inside a plaster arch. Two timber loungers face it from the deck opposite. The house rises two storeys around all this, glass along the ground floor and a planted balcony above, so from the daybed you are looking at your own villa and nothing else.

The ground floor is one room and does not pretend otherwise. A sofa is built into the floor along two walls, cushioned in pale linen, facing a smart television set among a wall of arched plaster niches filled with ceramics and dried grasses. Behind it a dark timber island carries a thick slab of white marble and an integrated hob, and the dining table — dark timber again, six cream upholstered chairs, three rattan pendants strung above — sits between the two. The whole side of the room slides away onto the pool deck; closed, with the curtains drawn, it becomes a very cool and very quiet place to sit out the middle of the day.

A white rendered staircase climbs out of the kitchen with no balustrade at all, a piece of sculpture as much as a stair. Upstairs one king bedroom looks over the neighbours’ tiled roofs and the palm tops through a broad window, its bed set against a low rendered ledge; the second king sits inside a tall arched recess with a rattan pendant hanging either side. Both have a bathroom of their own, and the bathrooms may be the best-finished rooms in the house — warm microcement throughout, one with a curved timber screen wrapped around the rain shower, the other with a poured concrete trough basin below a round mirror lit from behind.

Breakfast, if you order it, is best taken on the daybed with your feet over the water, and that same daybed is where the massage table goes once the sun has left the courtyard. There is no washing machine here, so laundry goes out through the concierge; and while the Batu Bolong strip is walkable, a scooter or a car with a driver makes short work of the beach clubs further along the coast. Housekeeping arrives each morning. Two king suites and a house rule against children between two and twelve make this a villa for a couple of couples or a pair of friends rather than a family.

Nova Oasis 4 is small, sharp and more private than most Canggu villas this close to the Batu Bolong strip: a courtyard of green water behind a tall timber door, with the coffee, the surf shops and Echo Beach all within a walk or a two-minute ride of the gate.