Villa Arunika

The lane down to Nyanyi runs out through paddy fields, and the gate at the end of it opens straight onto water. Villa Arunika lays a long rectangular pool along the entire length of its garden, with a sun-lounger platform moulded into the stone coping at one end and a frangipani leaning over the far corner. Two grey-rendered storeys with deep timber soffits stand along one side, their glass sliding away so the ground floor reads as part of the garden rather than a room looking at it. Nyanyi Beach and its black sand lie under two kilometres off, Tanah Lot a little over four, and on most mornings the loudest thing here is the filter and the rice behind the wall.

Indoors the house opens upwards. The living room is double height, one wall built from rough-cut honey limestone that climbs past the first floor towards a skylight, and an open-tread timber staircase floats across it on a black steel stringer with ferns planted underneath. Five woven rattan pendants hang in the void above. Along the base of the stone runs a long built-in banquette in tan leather, scattered with black-and-white ikat cushions and served by low round timber tables, a hanging egg chair at one end and a smart television facing it. The kitchen takes the other half of the volume: warm timber joinery, a pale stone island, opal-glass and brass pendants, a perforated timber wine wall and a dining table with its own bench.

Both bedrooms are doubles, each with its own bathroom, air conditioning and a television, and both share the same swirled plaster headboard wall and timber-battened ceiling. The larger takes the armchairs and the round table by the window; the second keeps a rattan egg chair beside its slider and looks over thatched roofs next door. It is the bathrooms that surprise. One holds a black river-stone oval tub with an open-air shower on a limestone wall behind it, so the water falls under the sky; the other sets twin grey stone basins on a concrete counter beneath arched timber-framed mirrors. Two hundred and fifty square metres for four guests is a generous ratio by any measure.

Housekeeping arrives daily and the concierge handles the rest, but two requests earn their keep more here than they would in town. A driver is the first, because Nyanyi is farmland and Canggu, Seminyak and the airport are all a proper drive away. A cook is the second, since that stone island and its oven are the best-equipped surface in the house and the dining bench seats everyone at once. Breakfast, when guests want it, lands on that same table under the rattan pendants. Massage therapists come to the villa, and a pool fence can be fitted for small children. Nothing else needs asking for: a cold drink meets guests at the dining bench, the safe sits in the master wardrobe, and the Wi-Fi carries as far as the loungers at the end of the pool.

Villa Arunika trades the noise of Canggu for a lane of rice and a pool you can swim lengths in. It is a house for two couples or a small family who want the sea within a few minutes and nothing much else within earshot, and who will happily spend an evening under those rattan pendants with the pool glowing violet outside.