Villa Vola

Villa Vola sits at the end of a gated cul-de-sac off Jalan Pantai Batu Bolong, behind a covered entrance with a garage deep enough for a car, a rank of scooters and a few surfboards. Past that the whole property is one long axis of water: an eighteen-metre pool running the full length of the house, with chaise lounges standing in the shallows, a bar counter built into the coping and a group of sunken cushioned sofas set below deck level and glazed over for shade. A slatted timber ceiling shelters the terrace along one side, hung with a line of woven rattan pendants, and past the far wall the rice fields of Batu Bolong start. The beach and the Canggu strip are a walk away, which is the trick of the address.

The house opens as a single double-height hub lit by a grid of skylights, and the first thing you see is a two-storey portrait of a woman’s face hand-painted on the wall above the kitchen island. Below it, bar stools; beside it, a long timber table laid for ten under blue-green ceramic pendants; and behind, a white spiral staircase curling up through the volume like a piece of sculpture. Off to one side the living room drops into the floor, ringed with built-in sage seating around a herringbone timber wall and a sixty-five-inch screen, arched niches full of ceramics and shell work. Every part of it opens to the pool, so the difference between inside and outside is a matter of where the shade falls.

Five bedrooms follow the same turquoise-and-timber language: painted leaf murals, arched timber headboards, built-in window daybeds. Three are generous masters; then comes a seventy-square-metre superior suite with its own balcony, and a hundred-square-metre executive suite with a private terrace looking straight over the rice fields — the room to claim if you are the one who booked. Each bathroom is travertine and pale timber with brass tapware, and the two suites take freestanding tubs and double showers. Upstairs there is a second sitting patio with another large screen and a deep sofa, which is where the teenagers go and stay.

A house this size only works fully staffed, and this one is: daily cleaning, the pool and garden tended two or three times a week, and someone on the gate at any hour. Book the private cook before anything else — the island seats the whole group while dinner is being made and the table takes ten, so eating in beats going out most nights. Then a nanny if two or three families are travelling together, and a pool fence, because with in-water loungers this pool has no proper shallow end for toddlers. Massage tables go under the glass-roofed sunken lounge, out of the sun. Ten guests in king beds, twenty with the built-in singles.

Villa Vola is built for the trip where everybody comes: two or three families, a milestone birthday, a wedding party that needs somewhere to spill out. Eighty-six guests have rated it 4.95, and the thing they keep describing is the pool — eighteen metres of it, with a bar at one end and nobody in a hurry to get out.