Villa Tiny

Villa Tiny is exactly what its name promises and rather more than you expect from it. The house is a single A-frame in white render, its whole gable end glazed in black steel, standing over a plunge pool in a walled courtyard planted with heliconia, banana and coconut palm. A fringe of alang-alang thatch hangs over the entrance like an eyebrow. Everything is small — the pool, the footprint, the kitchen — and everything has been drawn carefully enough that the smallness reads as intention rather than compromise. It sits in a quiet gated lane off Jalan Pantai Nyanyi, with the black sand of Nyanyi Beach about two kilometres down the road and Tanah Lot a little further.

The ground floor is one room under exposed rafters and a ceiling lined in split bamboo. A built-in banquette runs along the glazed wall with cushions and a jute rug, a rattan pouffe pulled up in front of it; a tall timber shelving unit divides the space without closing it, and behind that a bar-height counter with cane stools sits under two black rattan pendants. The kitchen is an L of white joinery topped in timber, with a brass tap, a gas hob, an oven, a rice cooker and an arched niche for the glassware — small, but a real kitchen rather than a kitchenette. Light comes through the gable in the morning and off the pool all afternoon.

An open-tread timber stair climbs to the sleeping level tucked into the apex of the roof. Up there a four-poster timber bed sits under white voile curtains, with a skylight overhead, a television on the wall and a full-height window in the gable that frames the fields behind the complex. The bathing arrangement is the villa’s real trick: a vanity indoors in timber and concrete under a round brass mirror, a glass-walled washroom that looks straight into a planted strip of garden, and outside a plaster bathtub with brass tapware set against a wall of rough coral stone, next to a shower and a sculpted white ledge at the pool edge with two stone stools on it.

Staff come daily to clean, and the stay includes a welcome drink, towels, fast Wi-Fi and a safe; the concierge handles the rest — breakfast, airport transfers, a car or a scooter, massages in the courtyard, laundry, restaurant bookings and day trips out to the temples. This is a two-person house and makes no pretence otherwise: one bed, one bathroom, one small blue rectangle of water, and a part of the coast that is still farmland and surf rather than traffic. Bring a scooter rather than a car, because the villa has room only for the former.

Two people, one roof, and a courtyard nobody can see into. Villa Tiny is a good deal more considered than most one-bedroom villas on this coast, and its stretch of Tabanan still belongs to rice fields and surf rather than to traffic. Come by scooter, cook at home, and swim before breakfast.