Villa Sagu

The lane off Jalan Batu Mejan gives nothing away: a white rendered wall, a solid timber door under a shallow arch, and then the courtyard opens and almost all of it is water. Villa Sagu sets its pool hard against the house, a narrow ribbon of turquoise running the length of the ground floor behind a wall of black-framed glass. A black-and-white striped parasol shades two loungers and a built-in daybed at the near end, banana palms lean in over the boundary wall, and a corner of alang-alang thatch throws shade across the terrazzo. Canggu’s cafes and its beach are a few minutes away on foot; from inside these walls you would never guess it.

The ground floor reads as a single room. A pale linen sectional sits a step down from the terrazzo, facing a wall-mounted screen, and behind it the dining table stands under two woven rattan pendants with the kitchen along the far wall: stove, oven, fridge, a Nespresso machine and enough pans to make cooking a real option rather than a gesture. Recessed arched niches in the white render hold small carvings and ceramics, and a pale terrazzo staircase climbs past them to the first floor. The glass wall slides away entirely, so the sofa, the table and the sun loungers end up in the same room and the light off the pool moves across the ceiling all afternoon.

Upstairs the plan is generous rather than large. Two king bedrooms sit side by side, identical in size and finish, each with its own shower room, a wardrobe, a writing desk and a smart television, so nobody is negotiating over the better room. Both open through arched windows onto Juliet balconies above the water. The bathrooms are where the house shows off: one wears sea-green herringbone tile from skirting to ceiling beneath a skylight, the other warm cream tile with a stone trough basin, an arched mirror and brass tapware. Down in the courtyard a second shower stands in an arched stone alcove set into the wall, for rinsing off salt before anyone goes inside.

Housekeeping comes every day, and arrival is on your own timetable, with someone on hand around the clock to let you in whenever the flight lands. The rest is a phone call: there is no washing machine here, so washing is collected and returned by the concierge; the striped daybed doubles as a massage table in the late afternoon; a cook will take over a kitchen that deserves more use than most holiday kitchens get. And if four is too few, the two houses immediately next door are built to the same plan and can be taken alongside this one, which makes six bedrooms and twelve guests across three private pools, each behind its own gate.

Villa Sagu is a small house that gets its proportions right: two equal suites, one long pool, and a ground floor that stops pretending to be indoors the moment the glass is pushed back. It suits two couples, or one with children, who want Canggu on the doorstep and a gate to close behind them at the end of the day.