The Jendela House

Jendela is Indonesian for window, and the house is named for the right thing. From the gate on Jalan Pura Kayu the building reads as two stacked slabs of white render with almost nothing between them but glass, and when the panels slide back the whole ground floor loses its fourth wall to the lawn. A fifteen-metre lap pool runs the length of that lawn, dark-tiled and edged in pale stone, a timber sun deck at one end and beanbags dropped on the grass beside it. Batu Belig beach is three hundred and fifty metres down the lane; the roosters and the motorbikes are audible, and so is the surf when the wind is right.

Inside, the living volume climbs two storeys. A long grey sectional gathers around a slab of driftwood beneath a cluster of woven rattan globes, and an open-tread timber staircase folds up the far wall to a gallery walkway behind glass. The dining table is a single live-edge plank of suar wood seating ten, which is the number the house holds; behind it the kitchen runs along a stone island with rattan bar stools, a gas hob, a good oven and a coffee machine. Grey stone floors carry through from the lounge to the pool coping, so bare feet never register the change.

The five bedrooms are all kings and all en suite, spread over two floors and each given its own idea: carved timber sculptures on one wall, a surf photograph and a cane armchair in another, a slatted timber headboard running the full width of a third. The bathrooms are dressed in slate with timber counters and stone basins, and one of them opens into a walled courtyard where a freestanding tub stands among heliconia under open sky. The roof is the surprise, and the point at which this house stops resembling other Canggu villas: a full lawn of turf painted with an enormous yin-yang, a steel pergola over deep sofas, a pitched-roof pavilion, a projection screen and a long gas fire table that runs down the middle of it all.

A villa manager is here full-time, rooms are made up every day and a guard is on the gate from eight each evening, which matters in a house this open. Ask and a cook takes over the island for a birthday dinner, a masseuse works on the rooftop before sunset, or a pool fence goes up around the lap pool for toddlers, and there is private parking behind the gate for the cars a group of ten arrives in. There is also a sauna, a jacuzzi and a shallow children’s pool, so wellness weekends, milestone birthdays and three-generation family holidays all land here for different reasons.

Few villas this size feel this light. The Jendela House gives ten people five equal suites, a lap pool along a real lawn and a roof terrace that turns into a cinema, a fire pit or a yoga deck depending on the hour, all a short walk from the sand at Batu Belig.