Sunbeam Oasis

The last stretch of lane to Sunbeam Oasis is unmade — a short, ordinary Seseh track that a car or a scooter takes in its stride — and then a white two-storey house appears above the rice, its roof edged in dark timber. The pool runs along the flank of it, one end squared off and the other rounded, set in travertine the colour of dry sand, with thatched parasols and loungers on the deck and a lawn and a garden swing beyond. The water is ionised rather than chlorinated, which means almost no chemistry at all: gentler on skin and eyes, and a relief to anyone who has spent a week fishing small children out of a stinging pool.

Inside, the ground floor is one bright, double-height room. The lounge is sunk a step below the rest of it, built-in banquettes running round three sides of a cluster of low timber tables and a sixty-five-inch screen on the wall, with a games console for wet afternoons. Behind it a long timber table seats eleven under three woven pendants, and the kitchen closes the room with a white stone island, rattan bar stools and cupboards deep enough to cook properly from — oven, freezer, blender, rice cooker, coffee machine. Arched niches are cut into the limewashed walls at intervals and lit from within, holding glassware and pale ceramics, while a white staircase climbs one wall on a thin black rail.

Four bedrooms are split across the two floors. Downstairs, a king room has its own bathroom and opens toward the pool terrace. Upstairs a second king sits under a ceiling lined in split bamboo, with sliding glass onto a private balcony that looks straight over the fields and an en-suite with a stone soaking tub; the remaining king and the twin room, dressed in white and forest green, share a large family bathroom with a tub of its own. Every bathroom is finished the same way, in fine mosaic tile with organic backlit mirrors, stone basins and brass tapware. Add the landing window and the rice-field walkway and there is a great deal of house here — three hundred and twenty-five square metres of it.

This is a family house before it is anything else, and the useful half of the concierge list bends the same way: a nanny for an afternoon, a pool fence fitted around water that already runs almost chemical-free, and a cook to fill that eleven-seat timber table rather than move eight people to a restaurant and back. The airport is twenty-two kilometres away, far enough that a driver on the day you land is worth arranging rather than improvising. Breakfast can be sent up to the roof terrace, which is paved, open on every side and best used before the sun is properly up — the same reason the yoga mats come out at that hour.

Sunbeam Oasis was built by people who thought about water, air and light before they thought about finishes, and it shows in small things — a pool that does not sting, walls that breathe, a roof that makes its own electricity. Then you climb to the terrace at six o’clock, and none of that is what you remember.