The Bukit Peninsula in southern Bali is a limestone plateau that ends, on its southern and western edges, in cliffs. Not gentle slopes to the water — cliffs, dropping forty, sixty, a hundred and fifty metres to the Indian Ocean below, with the swell arriving from the open ocean without interruption and the surf breaking…
Bali has been pulling women out of their ordinary lives for decades, and it isn’t by accident. The island has something — a particular quality of light, a cultural hospitality that feels genuine rather than performed, a landscape of rice terraces and river gorges and ocean sunsets that earns every cliché ever written about it…
The entrance to the Four Seasons Sayan is across a suspension bridge above a lotus pond — a design decision by the architect John Heah that most guests experience as a transition rather than an arrival, the bridge’s gentle movement and the water below and the sound of the Ayung River audible in the distance…
The COMO Shambhala Estate sits above the Ayung River gorge in the hills north of Ubud, in a position that the Balinese have understood as spiritually significant for centuries before the wellness industry arrived to confirm their assessment in the language of cortisol reduction and parasympathetic activation. The gorge drops steeply below the estate’s terraces…
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…
Adrian Zecha opened Amankila in 1992 on a hillside above Manggis in East Bali, and the three-tiered infinity pool that descends from the reception terrace toward the Lombok Strait below — each tier visible from the tier above, the pools cascading from the resort’s highest point to the lowest terrace above the coconut grove before…