Villa Vida

Batu Bolong’s main road carries most of Canggu’s traffic, and then a gate opens off it into a quiet cul-de-sac and the noise stops. A covered garage takes a car, a row of scooters and a rack of surfboards, and past it the house opens into a courtyard built entirely around water. The pool runs eighteen metres between two glazed wings, with chaise lounges submerged along one edge and a wet-and-dry bar counter built into the side, three stools standing in the shallows. A deep timber soffit hangs a long row of woven rattan pendants over the deck, a gilded Buddha relief catches the light on the end wall, and beyond the far corner the rice fields begin.

At the pool’s far end is the piece of the villa people talk about afterwards: a sunken sofa group dropped below deck level, shaded overhead and roofed in glass, facing out across the paddies. It is where the afternoon goes. Indoors the hall rises two storeys under a grid of skylights, with a curving sculptural staircase and a painted mural of a woman’s face crowned in flowers filling the wall above it. The open kitchen runs a long island and bar stools along that same wall; the dining table seats the whole house; and the living room drops a step into arched display niches around a sixty-five-inch screen. A second screen and a long sofa wait on the upstairs patio.

Five bedrooms sit around the water, three of them generous masters and two of them proper suites — a superior of seventy square metres with its own balcony, and an executive of a hundred with a terrace looking over the rice fields. Every room repeats the same clever trick: a cushioned bench runs the length of the window and converts to single beds, so any bedroom can take four. The décor changes room by room — coral botanicals, cream leaf print, a terracotta panel, always an arched timber headboard and a perforated gold pendant. The two suites take double showers and freestanding tubs set under skylights, which someone will fill with petals if you are celebrating.

The bar in the pool sets the tone for how this house is staffed. Drinks and lunch tend to happen without anyone getting out of the water, which is why a private cook is the extra guests here book first — there are twenty possible seats and a dining table long enough for all of them. A pool fence goes on when small children are in the group, and because the villa has its own garage rather than a scrap of verge, a car and driver can actually be kept for the week. Housekeeping arrives every morning; the water and the planting are looked after through the week.

Villa Vida is built for numbers. Twenty people can eat at one table, swim in eighteen metres of water and still find a corner to themselves, and the walk to Old Man’s takes five minutes. For a milestone birthday or a group who all want to be in the same house, there is very little in Batu Bolong that does it better.