Villa Vida & Vola

A private lane off Jalan Pantai Batu Bolong runs to a gate and stops there, and two houses stand behind it side by side. Villa Vida & Vola is both of them. Each has its own eighteen-metre pool, and each pool has a bar built into it — a stone counter at water level with timber stools sunk beside it, lit from below once the sun has gone. Along the deck a sofa group drops below floor level under a slatted timber canopy, glazed against the rain, facing rice fields that start at the boundary wall. Beyond the paddy, six minutes on foot, is Batu Bolong beach. A garden door in the party wall means the two villas can be run as one house or as two.

Inside, each villa opens on a double-height hall punched with skylights, the kitchen and dining at one end and the sunken living room at the other, both looking straight down the water. A hand-painted mural of a woman’s face fills the kitchen wall above the island; a white spiral stair curls up through the volume beside the dining table, which seats ten in woven rattan chairs under a cluster of pendants. The living room drops two steps to a long banquette and a sixty-five-inch screen, with herringbone timber panels and white plaster niches behind it. One villa is dressed in coral and terracotta, the other in teal and sea green, which is the quickest way to tell them apart.

Ten bedrooms, five to a house, all of them en suite. Three in each are master rooms; one is a superior suite of seventy square metres with a private balcony, and one an executive suite of a hundred with a terrace over the paddy. Every room takes a king and two single beds built into the window seat, so a room holds four and the pair of villas forty. Murals run behind the bedheads — palm fronds, shells, red leaves — and the carved arched headboards are lit by rattan sconces either side. The suite bathrooms have double showers and a soaking tub, one of them standing free beside a wall of open wardrobe shelving under a run of skylights. Each villa also keeps a second lounge upstairs with another large screen, open to the fields.

Forty people is a catering problem, and the answer here is the private cook, who will do breakfast, lunch and dinner in whichever of the two kitchens you point at. Sundowners take care of themselves, since nobody has to leave the water: both pools carry a bar counter at swimming height. Two garages swallow the scooters and the surfboards, which counts for something on a lane this close to Batu Bolong. Staff clean daily and the pools and gardens are seen to two or three times a week; a pool fence and a babysitter come through the same desk. Rooms this size, four beds apiece, make this a house for a wedding party, a company off-site, or three or four families who have decided to travel together.

Villa Vida & Vola is the rare large villa that does not behave like a hotel: two front doors, two kitchens, two pools with bars in them, and a door in the garden wall so the group can gather or scatter as it likes. The surf at Batu Bolong is six minutes away on foot.