Villa Ammanya

Villa Ammanya stands on Jalan Subak in Batu Bolong, a white two-storey house turned side-on to a twenty-metre lap pool tiled in green mosaic. The water runs the full flank of the building with lawn along one edge and a perforated brick screen wall along the other, so the light comes through it in squares all afternoon. Frangipani lean over the shallow end. At the far end, under an open timber frame, sits a small gym with a multi-station machine and a bike, which is not a thing you often find at a three-bedroom villa in Canggu. Berawa and Batu Bolong beaches are five minutes by scooter, and Love Anchor and La Brisa are closer than that.

Indoors the house is one tall white volume. The living room rises two full storeys to clerestory windows and a brass sputnik chandelier, with a mezzanine gallery running along one side behind a dark metal balustrade and a black steel staircase, timber-treaded and open-backed, climbing to it. A white sectional sits on a jute rug around a live-edge timber table. The kitchen shares the same room: a long marble island with a waterfall end under three copper-glass pendants, a proper oven behind it, and a timber dining table beside the garden window. Glass slides away on both flanks, so the room takes the pool on one side and the back garden on the other.

The three bedrooms are quieter than the space they sit in — pale timber floors, one deep blue rug apiece, a single abstract canvas, and sliding glass onto either the pool or the rice fields that run away behind the villa. Each has a queen bed, a safe in the wardrobe and its own bathroom, and one has a desk set at the window where the fields are the view. The bathrooms are white metro tile with timber-framed mirrors and brass wall lights, each with a panel of patterned encaustic tile behind the basin, and one takes a full-length bath under a small high window.

The villa comes staffed: cleaning daily, the pool and garden looked after two or three times a week, and someone on call through the night. Two things here are worth knowing before you book anything else. The parking bay holds two cars, which in this part of Canggu is close to a luxury, so hiring a vehicle actually makes sense from this address rather than being a daily parking problem. And that marble island with an oven behind it is the argument for the private cook — breakfast carried out to the covered terrace beats queuing at Canggu’s cafes by some distance. A pool fence for small children is worth asking about too, since twenty metres of lap pool has no shallow end to speak of.

Villa Ammanya suits people who want Canggu without living in it: a lap pool to swim properly in, a gym to use before the heat arrives, and rice fields off the back of the bedrooms. A hundred and ten guests have rated it 4.89, and most of them mention the same two things — the space, and how quickly you can be at the beach.