Bulgari Resort Bali Review: The Cliff and the Ocean

The Bulgari Resort Bali is one hundred and fifty metres above the Indian Ocean on the Bukit Peninsula’s western cliff — a position of such specific physical drama that the Bulgari brand’s design team, working with the Balinese architectural tradition and the Italian fashion house’s visual vocabulary simultaneously, produced a resort whose drama is the site’s gift rather than the building’s achievement. The cliff is real. The ocean below it is real. The specific quality of standing on the villa terrace above the afternoon surf and looking west at the Indian Ocean horizon in the last light of the day is real and present and as good as it sounds. What the architects and the designers contributed is the intelligence not to compete with it.

The sixty villas are built from the black lava stone of the Bukit Peninsula’s geology — dark, rough-textured, minimal in their decoration in the way that a building whose context provides all the required visual complexity should be minimal. The Italian modernist furniture, the Bulgari design language visible in the fixtures and the accessories, and the specific Balinese craftsmanship of the carved wooden details produce an interior that is simultaneously Balinese and Italian in its references and neither completely in its result — which is the Bulgari brand’s aesthetic intention and the architectural expression of a fashion house that has been translating its design vocabulary into hospitality since the Rome property opened in 2004.

Il Ristorante Luca Fantin

The restaurant named for its chef — Luca Fantin, who has been running the kitchen since 2009 and who has held the Michelin star that the restaurant was awarded in consecutive Michelin Guide editions since the Guide’s first Japan edition included this Bali property through the reciprocal Asian coverage — serves Italian cuisine interpreted through the lens of Balinese and Southeast Asian ingredients. The approach is not fusion in the approximate sense that fusion is usually applied — not the Mediterranean sauce on the Asian fish — but the Italian technique applied to the Indonesian ingredient with the same precision and the same ingredient respect that the Italian tradition demands of the Italian product. The Balinese seafood in the brodo that the Italian cooking tradition would have made from the Ligurian coast’s catch. The local baby vegetables in the Italian preparations that the garden’s climate produces in the configuration that the Bali growing season enables. The result is a tasting menu whose identity is specific rather than approximate and whose quality is at the level that the Michelin recognition implies.

The Il Bar cliff-top lounge, above the restaurant, serves the cocktail that the Bulgari mixologist has prepared as the house signature since the property opened, in a setting where the cliff and the ocean and the sunset constitute the hospitality rather than the bar’s decoration. The guest who occupies the outside terrace at the Il Bar at the precise moment when the sun reaches the horizon and the Indian Ocean produces the specific light that the latitude creates in January — the orange and the pink above the dark blue, the gradients unobstructed by any land mass between the Bukit cliff and Antarctica — is receiving the best free event available in Bali regardless of what they paid for the room.

The Cliff Elevator

The elevator cut into the cliff face descends from the resort level to a private beach accessible to guests only — a beach that the cliff’s overhanging face shelters from view from above and that the surf that rounds the peninsula’s point delivers in the specific conditions that make it different from the crowded Uluwatu beach strip a kilometre east. The beach is small — a hundred metres of sand, a natural cave at the base of the cliff, the Indian Ocean in the foreground — and it is the secret that every guest who uses the elevator discovers and that becomes the thing they tell people about when they describe the stay. The cliff elevator is not a feature. It is the transition between the cliff-top resort and the ocean below it, and the transition is itself the experience.

The Spa

The Bulgari Spa’s eight treatment rooms include the cliff-edge outdoor space where the treatments happen above the ocean’s sound and within the ocean’s smell — the salt air, the specific iodine of the Indian Ocean’s surface, the temperature differential between the cliff’s shade and the sun on the exposed terrace. The Balinese massage techniques, the volcanic ash and frangipani treatments that draw from the Bukit Peninsula’s geological resources, and the specific quality of a spa experience that is conducted one hundred and fifty metres above the sea constitute the most dramatically positioned treatment in Bali and, arguably, in any resort spa in Southeast Asia.

The Honest Note on Uluwatu

The Uluwatu temple — the sea temple perched on the cliff edge two kilometres from the resort, at the peninsula’s furthest point, where the Indian Ocean’s swell arrives at the cliff base and the Kecak fire dance is performed at sunset on the temple’s outer terrace — is the reason to spend an afternoon away from the Bulgari’s grounds. The temple’s specific position above the surf and the specific quality of the Kecak performance in that setting — the circular chorus of bare-chested men performing the monkey army’s battle by firelight above the cliff — is the most specifically Balinese cultural experience accessible from the Uluwatu resort strip and the correct use of the evening that the sunset from the Il Bar provides for the first half of and the Kecak provides for the second.

Practical Details

59 villas and 3 residences. Room-only. Rates from approximately $1,500-$2,000 per night in low season. Ngurah Rai Airport Denpasar is approximately 30 minutes by road — the shortest luxury resort transfer in Bali. Il Ristorante Luca Fantin dinner reservations are essential; the restaurant’s capacity is limited and the tasting menu’s pacing requires the full evening.