Villa Aless

Villa Aless stands behind a gate on Gang Sri Kahyangan, inside a small secured complex and with a garage of its own, which in Berawa counts for a great deal. The house is two storeys of dark steel and glass with a curtain of trailing greenery drawn across the upper floor, and it is arranged the long way around a lap pool that runs almost the full depth of the plot. A strip of lawn lies along one side and sun loungers along the other; at the far end a bale faces back down the water from a wall of burnt-orange render with speakers set into it. Berawa Beach is a six-minute walk and there is coffee fifty metres up the lane.

The ground floor is one long double-height room, glazed from floor to ceiling and open to the water once the doors are folded back. Its centre is a sunken lounge — a square of emerald cushions dropped into a timber-lined pit around low drum tables, facing a very large screen with a BOSE system wired through the house. Behind it a black table seats ten under a cluster of blown-glass pendants, and a steel-and-timber staircase floats past a life-size giraffe on its way up. The kitchen is the darkest thing here, deep blue joinery with a live-edge timber breakfast counter, placed so that whoever is cooking stays in the conversation.

Four bedrooms, all king, all with their own bathroom. Two are calm and modern in timber and stone with the bed facing the glazing; two carry four-poster frames, mosquito netting and raffia pendants over jute rugs, and those two take a single bed as well, which is how the house reaches ten. The bathrooms are the good part: freestanding tubs on timber platforms, twin basins on live-edge shelves, round mirrors, and one with a great raffia sunburst mounted on burnt orange behind the bath. Off another is a timber sauna behind a slatted glass door. The gym is on the mezzanine, glazed on two sides, and above it a rooftop deck carries a jacuzzi and an ice bath under a taut shade sail.

Sauna below, ice bath and jacuzzi on the roof, gym on the landing between them — none of it needs booking, which is the real argument for this house. What the concierge adds is mostly food: breakfast can be laid on every morning at extra cost and is free for children under six, and a chef will take over that ten-seat table for an evening. A cot and a highchair are already in the house, the ninth and tenth guests sleep on extra beds at a nightly charge per person, and the staff clean through every day. It suits two families travelling together, or a group who came for the cold water as much as the pool.

Villa Aless is a lot of house for Berawa: dark steel, deep glass, a lap pool the length of the garden and a roof deck that catches the last of the light over the palms. Nothing about it is quiet or restrained, and after a week of sauna, cold water and breakfast at the counter, you will not want it to be.