Salt Villa

Jalan Jepun Sari runs back off the Bingin cliff road through a knot of small lanes, and Salt Villa sits at the end of one of them behind a plain white wall. What is on the other side is a corridor of water: a lap pool the length of the plot, its floor laid in a chequerboard of dark and pale stone, with a timber sun deck and two loungers at the garden end and a built-in sofa under a bamboo pergola at the other. The house rises two storeys above it in white render and vertical timber slats, and one enormous half-round window is cut into the upper floor. Banana leaves lean over the wall; a neighbour’s thatch shows above it.

The ground floor is a single double-height room that opens straight onto the water. A low white sectional wraps two sides of it around a pair of live-edge timber tables, facing a television hung between arched niches that are lit from within and stacked with carved figures and small pots. Behind that the kitchen runs along one wall in warm timber joinery — refrigerator, microwave, stove, a water dispenser, wine glasses in the cupboards — and a round timber table with rattan-backed chairs sits between it and the glass. In the corner a staircase of open timber treads climbs a black steel stringer out of a bed of river pebbles, a potted palm at its foot.

Both bedrooms are upstairs, off a landing where a row of small arched alcoves glows along one wall behind a black bar balustrade. Each room is dressed in taupe linen on a timber platform bed with a panelled headboard and a strip of concealed light beneath it, and each has two rattan pendants, one large and one small, hung at different heights. The half-round windows are the reason to be up here: full height, curtained on both sides, with a long timber bench built under the sill and wide enough to sit on. One looks into the crown of a tree, the other across roofs to the Bukit ridge. The en-suites are pale plaster and grey stone, vessel basins under arched black mirrors, showers behind louvred timber screens.

Four guests is the whole capacity, so the service here is light and close at hand: staff let themselves in to clean each day, the pool and garden are seen to two or three times a week, and someone is reachable at any hour to open the gate, since check-in is self-service if you land late. Two things are worth arranging before you arrive. There is no washing machine in the house, so laundry goes out through the concierge; and Bingin’s beaches are reached down cliff steps rather than by car, which makes a scooter or a driver the difference between one beach in a day and three. A masseuse will set up on the poolside sofa under the pergola.

Salt Villa is a narrow house that spends its whole width on water, and everything faces it — the sofa, the kitchen glass, the arched windows two floors up. Surf, cliff cafes and warungs are a few minutes away in every direction, but most days end where they started, on the sofa under the bamboo, with the pool going violet.