Villa Jenna

Off Jalan Batu Belig, a few hundred metres back from the sand, Villa Jenna opens onto water before anything else. The pool runs the length of the courtyard with a curved shallow end for sitting in, a strip of lawn down one side and timber loungers under a cream parasol. Above it the house folds over in two storeys, its underside lined in warm timber battens that throw stripes across the terrace, and a first-floor walkway with a glass balustrade looks straight down into the blue. Two hundred and fifty square metres, and the first impression is of shade and depth rather than of a building.

Inside, the ground floor is one tall room. A long cream sectional and two round timber coffee tables sit under a coffered ceiling and a cluster of woven rattan pendants, facing a sixty-five-inch screen; the living room is air conditioned, which in Bali is rarer than it should be. Behind, a white marble island with six timber stools serves the kitchen — oven, microwave, blender, rice cooker, toaster, wine glasses — and a marble dining table for six stands beneath its own pendant beside an arched niche cut into the wall. A floating timber staircase with a slim black rail climbs through the middle of it all.

Three king bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, are spread over both floors, and the design keeps a single restrained language: pale fluted timber behind one headboard, an arched niche and a leaning mirror in another, cane armchairs and linen throughout. One opens through full-height glass to the rooftops and palms of the neighbourhood. The bathrooms are done in seamless microcement with floating stone vanities and black tapware, and one of them puts a freestanding oval tub right beside a glass door to the pool, so you can climb out of one into the other. There is a desk if you need one, and the pool has a shallow end and a fence available for small children.

Two things families usually have to ask for are already here: the pool has a curved shallow end to sit in and a fence that can be fitted to it, and there is parking behind the gate. What the concierge adds is breakfast — best ordered onto the ground-floor terrace, where the timber-battened soffit lays stripes of shade until mid-morning — and a nanny, which is the difference between an hour at the beach and an afternoon. Laundry, ironing and dry cleaning are all on the list, useful with six people and a nine-hundred-metre walk to the sand and back. A driver is the fourth: Petitenget and Seminyak are close, but not close enough to park in.

Villa Jenna is a house built for the hours between swims: shade under the timber, cold air in the lounge, a tub within reach of the pool. Batu Belig sits far enough from the Canggu traffic to feel residential, and close enough that dinner is never a project.