Villa Sunset Berawa

Gang Pepaya runs off Jalan Raya Semat, and at the end of it stands a building that looks nothing like the thatch-and-teak idea of a Bali villa. Villa Sunset Berawa is three storeys of board-formed concrete and pale stone panels, stepped back at each level so that every floor gets its own deck. The pool lies along one flank, long and rectangular, with a broad timber deck on one side and a strip of lawn on the other where striped loungers sit under white market parasols. A coiled bamboo sculpture stands on the grass like a wave that has stopped moving. Berawa’s cafes start a hundred metres away, and the beach is a quarter of an hour on foot.

The ground floor is the working half of the house. A matte black kitchen runs along one wall, its island fronted in fluted timber, with a sculptural black installation across the ceiling above it and enough equipment for people who actually cook: oven, freezer, blender, rice cooker, wine glasses. Beside it a circular table with woven black chairs sits under a lit ring pendant, positioned so that the whole group faces the water through the sliding glass. Upstairs on the second floor is something else entirely, a living room hung floor to ceiling in red velvet curtains around a deep pale sectional, a monochrome rug and a very large screen with a sound system behind it.

Four king bedrooms are spread up through the building, each with a television, air conditioning, black-out blinds and its own bathroom, and each opening onto a balcony or a deck. Three of them are done in grey wall panelling with sheer curtains hung on ceiling tracks and arched mustard headboards, their bathrooms fitted with slatted timber vanities and stone basins against raw concrete. The fourth is the reason to book the villa: the whole third floor, lined in warm timber overhead and underfoot, with a freestanding stone bath standing beside a long timber vanity, an outdoor shower, and glass that folds back onto a private deck looking over the roofs and palms of Berawa.

Eight people generate laundry, and there is no washing machine on the premises, so the laundry and ironing service tends to be the first thing a group sets up. A cook is the second: the matte black kitchen is fitted for someone who means it — oven, rice cooker, blender, wine glasses — and the circular table beneath its ring pendant faces the pool through sliding glass, which beats anything on Jalan Raya Semat for a large party. Parking is on the street rather than the plot, so a car with its own driver saves a daily negotiation. And the third-floor deck off the master, screened by nothing but rooflines, is where the massage table goes.

Villa Sunset Berawa is unusually architectural for this stretch of coast, and it earns the drama: concrete and stone below, a red room in the middle, and a timber suite on the roof with a bath by the window. Days start in the pool, end on the third floor, and Berawa carries on a hundred metres away.