Villa Sunsara 4

Jalan Segara Perancak carries you off the Berawa strip and stops a few hundred metres short of the sand. Behind the gate at number ten the ground opens into a straight fifteen-metre lane of water, hemmed on both sides by frangipani and palm thick enough to hide the neighbours, loungers set along the stone deck and the two white storeys of Villa Sunsara 4 running down one flank. The living floor has no walls to speak of, glass sliding away on two sides, so the first thing you do here is walk from the gate into a room and out again onto the lawn without quite noticing where one became the other.

That living floor is a single long space in pale stone. Two deep sofas face each other across a low white table under a ceiling fan, cushions in sea-glass blue against oatmeal linen, and beyond them a glass-topped dining table on a heavy timber base seats eight beneath three woven rattan pendants. The kitchen is white joinery with an island bar and windows on two sides, properly equipped down to an oven as well as a stove, a coffee maker, a toaster, a kettle and wine glasses, so a night in is genuinely easy. Upstairs a second sitting room, quieter and cooler, holds built-in shelving, a desk and a television for the hour when everyone else is still in the pool.

All four bedrooms take a king in a four-poster, most of them draped in white voile, and each has its own bathroom. Ceilings are alang-alang thatch over exposed timber, lit from a cove where the roof meets the wall, and the floors upstairs are polished dark hardwood, which is what gives these rooms their weight. The bathrooms vary usefully: one holds a freestanding oval tub against a teal wall with a long travertine vanity and a bank of ferns, another sets a round backlit mirror in carved stone above a live-edge timber shelf and a stone bowl basin. One bedroom opens onto the upper terrace, where a round rattan daybed sits under a fan with the rice fields beyond the wall.

Staff clean daily, breakfast is part of the stay, and the concierge handles what is not: a driver, a car or a scooter, massages at the villa, a nanny, a pool fence, laundry, restaurant tables and days out among the temples. Berawa Beach is three hundred metres down the lane with Finn’s, Atlas and a run of cafes closer still, so this is a villa for a group who want to walk to dinner and swim before breakfast. Eight guests in four equal king suites across four hundred square metres and two floors means nobody ends up on top of anybody else.

Villa Sunsara 4 is the rare Berawa house that is both in the middle of things and entirely private: fifteen metres of water behind a screen of frangipani, four thatched bedrooms above it, and the beach close enough to walk to with wet hair. Days start with breakfast on the pool deck and end at a table nobody had to drive to.