Villa Asri Nyanyi

The approach is the first good thing. A steel arbour heavy with flowering creeper runs from the gate along the side of the house to a carved timber and metal door, and the lane noise of Jalan Pantai Nyanyi stops the moment that door closes behind you. Inside, the villa opens into a double-height hall of pale limestone where an open-tread stair floats on a single black steel stringer and a cluster of overlapping timber discs hangs in the void above it. Straight ahead the glass folds away onto a long pool, and past the pool the rice fields begin and keep going. Nyanyi Beach is under two kilometres down the road.

The living room is one you sit down into. An L-shaped sectional in putty linen is sunk into the floor around a round drum of solid timber, the tiles beneath it patterned encaustic, and the television is mounted in a circular timber frame that swivels between the room and the water. The kitchen runs along one side in warm timber with rattan-fronted cupboards, a concrete island with a double sink and a live-edge counter with ikat stools pulled up to it, which is where breakfast tends to happen. Ceilings are lined in timber throughout, walls are textured plaster and pale stone, and paddy fills nearly every window.

Three king bedrooms are set across the two floors, each with a curved plaster arch cut behind the bedhead, black dome pendants either side and a full wall of timber joinery. All three have air conditioning, a television and a window onto the fields. The bathrooms are the surprise: black volcanic-stone basins sit on concrete slabs beneath arched timber-framed mirrors, and one has no roof at all — open to the sky under glass, ferns climbing the stone, a black stone tub set into the floor. Four hundred square metres means nothing feels tight, and a guest washroom behind a backlit timber screen saves the trip upstairs.

Housekeeping comes daily and the villa is properly staffed, so towels reappear and the pool stays clear without anyone having to ask. Two things are worth arranging before you arrive. The first is wheels: Kabunku and The Hum are three or four minutes away on a scooter, but Canggu is a genuine drive and slower again in traffic, and the airport is twenty-three kilometres off, so a transfer earns its cost on the first evening. The second is a massage — the table goes out on the timber deck under the pergola at the pool’s end, and the rice fields take care of the rest.

Villa Asri Nyanyi is a quiet, well-made house on the edge of the rice: three equal king rooms, a pool the length of the building, and a stair hall that would hold its own in any design magazine. It suits two or three couples travelling together, or a family who want the beach near and the crowds somewhere else entirely.