Villa Akar & Daun

You arrive at a wall of stacked volcanic stone with a small dark plaque on it reading Akar, and a few metres along the same wall a second one reading Daun. Villa Akar & Daun is two houses on one Berawa plot, each behind its own gate and each with its own pool, and together they make an eight-bedroom estate for sixteen. Past the entrance the planting takes over — banana palms, heliconia and traveller’s palms crowding the walls — and each pool runs the length of its courtyard in green mosaic tile beside a broad hardwood deck. Berawa Beach is about a quarter of an hour on foot from the gate, and Made’s Warung is two hundred metres up the road.

Both houses open the same way. Tall sliding glass runs down one side of the living room, and when it is pushed back the deck and the lounge behave as one long space under a dark timber ceiling. Akar’s is the calmer of the two, a low sectional and a round stone coffee table facing the water; Daun is the sleeker, a two-storey volume with paper-globe pendants hanging in the void and a glass-balustraded walkway crossing above the pool. Each has a dining table for eight in dark timber with woven-seat chairs, a kitchen built around a stone-topped island with stools, an oven and a full-size fridge, and a wall-mounted screen for the evenings that stay in.

The eight bedrooms are split four and four, every one with a king bed and its own bathroom. The ground-floor suites sit beside the pool and open straight onto it; the upstairs rooms trade that for height and a view over the palms. Detailing changes from room to room — a grid of dark panels behind one bed, a wall of carved green relief behind another, rattan bedheads, teak window seats, oval mirrors, small brass reading lamps — while the materials stay constant. Four of the eight are master suites with a deep freestanding bath, two in each house, set in stone-lined rooms with a window onto a planted light well and a rain shower behind glass.

Sixteen people across two houses need a little organising, and the concierge is set up for exactly that. A private cook is the most useful booking here, because there are two full kitchens and a pair of eight-seat tables to fill, and a pool fence is worth asking about since both pools sit level with the living-room floor. There is free parking inside the gate, unusual on this side of Berawa, which means cars rather than a queue of scooters. Staff clean daily and tend the pools and gardens two or three times a week, a massage table can be set up on either deck, and groceries can be delivered before you land.

Villa Akar & Daun works best when a big group wants to be together without living on top of each other: two kitchens, two pools, two front doors, one property. Finns, Atlas and the Berawa cafes are all inside ten minutes, and the beach is a walk rather than a drive.