Hot Property Bali
Vol. 4, Summer 2006

By Khandi McWilliams

Villa Laeticia is situated in the stunning Bukit area of south Bali with its Mediterranean climate and breathtaking cliff top views. A collaboration of both owner and architect the villa is contemporary minimalist with the owner's love of colour evident throughout.

The owner, who arrived in Bali in 1980 after selling his share in Black Star Liner, a Reggae Music Production business in Amsterdam, is no stranger to self-building; Villa Laeticia is the fourth house he's built in Bali. The first was in Seminyak 25 years ago, a simple Northern Thailand compound style structure on stilts, "back then there was no infrastructure or electricity just dirt roads, the house was very simple made of bamboo and alang-alang". After selling it he built another in exactly the same style next door, but this time using cement.

After the third house, built in Batu Jimbar, Sanur, it took nearly 6 years to find the right area. "I was renting in the Bukit for over a year and a half, I loved the views and feeling up there, I never got bored. I decided I wanted this feeling everyday. I purchased a 15 are block of land behind the villa I was renting"

"After buying the land I started putting my ideas down on paper, at that point I had a pretty definite idea of what I wanted, but I couldn't even draw a straight line, and things were a little back to front, the fitness room is now where the lounge started out. I also knew at that point that i wanted an 'L' shape structure but however much tried, I could not work out how to connect the two ends. I called Yew Kuan, a long term architect friend of mine and asked him to come over and take a look at the land and initial ideas. He was extremely busy at the time and warned me that he would only be able to help me with the initial concepts".

There are so many variations on the theme or thinking behind how the curved shape of the terrace came about, was it meant to feel like the prow of a ship or something completely different? "When Yew Kuan and I sat down and talked through my ideas it took him just and hour to complete the concept, once it was on paper I could see that the straight lines made the whole structure feel a little hard, it needed to be softened up, it needed to be sexier, like the curves of a woman! He understood instantly and swept his pen across the paper to produce the final curved design. It felt right. It is only later that the landscaper also remarked that the building curves followed the contours of Jimbaran Bay".

"Yew Kuan liked the concept so much he decided to help me build it and work started quickly once the room locations and functionality was agreed, it really helped that I was living next door, I could visit the site a couple of times a day and keep an eye on things."

Ice cream flavours
The house is contemporary minimalist, the owners having rejected typical Bali style carvings and ornate flourishes in favour of simple clean lines. The owners also love colour and came up with some funky colour schemes. Besides the aesthetics they also practice colour therapy (how colour influences the brain). The clever use of colours throughout this home creates an overall sophisticated but fun relaxed atmosphere.

The layout
The three storey dwelling sits on 1,500m2 and offers 800m2 of living space. The heart of the home is on the second floor, a spacious open plan living area incorporating the kitchen, dining and living rooms where natural light streams in from the floor to ceiling glass doors allowing cross breezes to sweep through the entire area in 2 sides. The owner has a passion for cooking and the kitchen has been designed with major entertaining in mind, incorporating a large granite central island for prepping.

Directly below is the entrance level and second living quarters which house the family/playroom, home office, staff kitchen, utility area, garage and storage room. On the opposite side of the 'L' on the second and third stories are the master bedroom suite with dressing room and a further 2 bedroom suites. Below the bedrooms is a full size gym and exercise studio at pool level, where the infinity lap pool beckons after a hard work out.

Limitations
Favourite parts of the house for the owner are "the terrace, kitchen and the gym". With a very young family now in tow there have also been some minor concessions, the quirkiest is the addition of a white picket fence, so the children do not wonder unsupervised to the pool area. The only disappointment for the owner is the roof, he had planned a Sydney style flat roof terrace, however, the surrounding home owners objected saying it should fit in with the surrounding properties. He sighs heavily "the sunsets could have been even more spectacular". Even so, Villa Laeticia is defiantly different from its rather 'traditional' neighbours and is a breath of fresh air in terms of style and design in Bali.

The property offers: Master bedroom suite with dressing area and en suite bathroom. Two further en-suite bedrooms, study, 2 elegantly appointed upstairs and downstairs living areas, large kitchen/dining area with black marble topped central island unit, pool side gym/exercise studio, swimming pool (4x20m2), guest cloak room, large wrap around roof terrace. Staff quarters include further kitchen/utility room and large pantry and garage. Available freehold. Total land area: 1,500m2. Total build area 800m2.

Located 25 minutes drive from the airport, this is a truly unique opportunity to acquire and excellently presented property. For further details, please contact us.

Fine Restaurants & Villas
Vol 2, no.6,
April-May 2006

If you are looking for a solidly built, quality home, this could be the house for you and built in an Australian contemporary style by one of the island's famed architects, the three storey, terraced residence has plenty of room with three spacious bedrooms and storage space in abundance. The top floor kitchen open-living area and main bedroom have incredible views overlooking the ocean, Kuta and as fas as peaks of Kintamani. On a clear morning it seems almost possible to reach out and touch Mount Agung.

The contemporary design also affords many natural touches like handmade marbua timber railings for the balcony, intriguing teak wood timber flooring combined with ceramic tiled borders and a specially custom-built kitchen from Singapore featuring German made fittings with extensive use of stainless and granite slate feature tops. Fully equipped, the kitchen and open living room is an ideal entertaining area. The main bedroom is spacious with ample storage and separate walk-in robes connecting to the adjoining bathroom which also has extensive views.

Downstairs the house combines indoor and outdoor areas connecting from the main entrance via terrazzo walk ways to two bedrooms and separate children's playroom and living area. A fully equipped gym overlooks the 21 meter infinity pool on the lower level to make this one of the most stylish, compact and well designed and built properties on the market. It comes fully furnished with quality imported and interior designed furnishing throughout and includes generator, pabx and much more.

This three year old home is immaculate in presentation, construction and being within an exclusive housing complex, offers secure and luxurious family living.

Text by Jeremy Allan Photography courtesy
of Villa Laeticia and Melbourne Loynd Photography

Bali Style
Vol. 2, No. 1, 2006

Baroque ornamentation is a defining characteristic of Bali Style. Hotel lobbies, residential living rooms and villa pavilions are all-too-often an unruly mélange of vibrant color and extravagant architectural embellishments. This is to be expected, the traditional motifs and design flourishes that from the basis Bali Style were inspired largely by the Paradise Isle's luxuriant floral vegetation. But there is another Bali, as harsh and desolate as the heartland is lush and verdant. This is the Bukit, the arid limestone hills forming a peninsula jutting into the Indian Ocean at the southernmost reaches of the island.

During most of the year, the Bukit exhibits and almost Mediterranean vista of stark, sun drenched hills and precipitous, jagged cliff faces rising from the sea, Water is scarce here, before the recent installation of municipal piped water Bukit dwellers drilled wells hundreds of meters deep, or devised ingenious methods of capturing and storing the wet season rain. Nevertheless, homes, hotels, and villas now cover much of the once-barren Bukit, to accommodate those attracted by the matchless surfing and spectacular vistas of Bali and the ocean.

Perched on 1500 square meters of land tumbling down a northward-facing cliff near the highest point of the Bukit, the Villa Laeticia might have been carved from thus barren landscape, much as a bamboo-and-thatch bungalow seems to have grown from the rice fields of Bali proper. Designed by Cheong Yew Kuan, whose credits include such Bali Style masterworks as the Begawan Giri, the 800 square meters Villa Laeticia seems to be the antithesis of the island's world-renowned, flamboyant architectural style. This minimalist, L-shaped structure, spare and angular, allows free movement of air through all sections. With no impediments to the view, save a low picket fence installed on one embankment for the safety of the owner's small children, the breathtaking vista seems almost a part of the house itself, a constant, inspirational presence visible from every corner of the structure.

The genesis of the design for Villa Laeticia was a sailing ship, and the upper terrace of the structure has the sensuous lines of a racing yacht, an impression reinforced by the prow-shaped front terrace and wooden railings. The north-east wing contains the master bedroom and bathroom - with a double bathtub positioned at a window to encourage hours-long soaks with all of Bali at your feet - on to level, two family bedrooms below, and a gym on the ground floor, extending to a poolside terrace. The opposite wing holds and enclosed playroom, video lounge and home office on the ground level. Save a few utility rooms, the entire upper floor is an open space, divided by counters and waist-high shelving into an open reception area and a self-contained apartment for the household staff on the ground floor, with and outdoor dining area on the second story.

Outdoor walls are made of paras with pebble wash non-slip flooring for safety and easy maintenance. Interior finishing is mostly hardwoods such as teak and merbau. Though the owners opted for an open roof with exposed hardwood beams, as in a typical Bali.

Style home, they rejected high-maintenance alang alang as the roofing material. Instead, they installed ceramic roof tiles, ordering custom-made straight tiles from manufacturer in Surabaya instead of the s-curved interlocking tiles used in most Indonesian dwellings.

Reinforced pillars driven deep into the limestone provide rock-solid for the upper story, an important consideration for a dwelling hanging over a precipice in an earthquake zone. However, the tough limestone did impose servere restrictions on landscaping. All outdoor spaces follow the existing contour of the land; the lap pool was the only concession to landscape design. The twenty-two by four meter pool had to be manually chipped out during the course of three grueling months, as the powerful machinery needed to remove such a volume of solid limestone would have caused unacceptable disruption to the neighborhood.

The owners lived in an adjacent villa during construction, inspecting the site at least twice a day and making frequent adjustments as design deficiencies ans miscalculations became apparent. Both owners characterize themselves as highly organized; every aspect of the furniture and fittings was fashioned to serve a specific function, from the shelving of various heights and depths (some for CDs, others for books) to the kitchen power plugs placed in the exact location needed for a particular counter-top appliance. Like a successfull restaurant or hotel manager who oversees every detail, the owners personally supervised the selection and installation of every fitting, evaluating each component for safety, functionality and ease of maintenance.

As with the structure itself, ease of mantenance and durability were the primary considerations for selecting materials for external and interior furnishings. Synthetics were used exclusively for all furnishing exposed to the elements; high quality hardwoods and a mixture of local and imported fabrics were used for interior furnishings. To ensure acceptable quality, the owners themselves purchased all wood used external railings and interior shelving and furnishings, drying and treating the wood on the premises.

The spacious interior allows for the judicious use of accent walls abd multi-hued furnishings and accesories without producing an eye-straining riot of color. There is minimal formula decoration save a handful of striking paintings and photographs. The only obvious thematic artistic flourish extending throughout the Villa Laeticia is the owner's modest collection of petrified wood, with some pieces set in pale yellow sand, reflecting the desert-like ambience of the Bukit.

The foundations of Bali Style; traditional Balinese concepts of geomancy which govern the placement of pavilions and facilities, the symbolism of the decorative flourishes and other aspects of interior design, are all intended to foster a restful and comforting atmosphere while reflecting a harmonious relationship with the physical and social environs. As a safe, functional, and comfortable dwelling in visual harmony with the austere environment of the Bukit, the angular, minimalist Villa Laeticia might be considered as much a model Bali Style as and ornate sandstone and alang-alang bungalow squatting in the rice fields of Ubud.

Tropical Asian Architecture - 2005

Photography & Editor
Patrick Bingham-Hall

Year of completion: 2004
Location: Jimbaran, Bali, Indonesia
Architect: Cheong Yew Kuan

Perched a top a hill, looking across the lower slopes of the Bukit peninsula between Jimbaran and Nusa Dua, the Santo House is and unexpected discovery within and estate of pseudo-Balinese contemporary villas. While the conventional hipped roofs bow to the inevitable pressures of neighborhood context, the rest of the house portrays a decidedly different character. The chief architectural gesture is a startling, almost expressionistic, curving concrete balcony that sweeps the length of the living pavilions to join the sleeping pavilion, a three-storey block angled away to embrace the swimming pool below.

The style of the house is deliberately non-Balinese echoing the 1950s P&O style streamlining favoured during the Suharto years, a yearning for a nascent modernity, which has since given way to the power regionalist forms and detail ubiquitous in Bali, The bold abstract painted forms below the roofline reflect the independent spirit of the house's owner, whose unusual collection of giant pieces of petrified timber form sculptural groupings in the entry and courtyard garden. The Santo House reveals Cheong Yew Kuan's responsiveness to a specific client and place; it's all eminently down-to-earth, but the house is skirted by a wild curving balustrade and joyously colored walls which refused to acknowledge the sentimentality of the neighborhood’s instant patina of age.

Text by
AYS. T

Photography by
Kelley Cheng

ISH No. 040/03/2004

Gleefully Modern
To ride up to Bukit at Jimbaran provided a rather serial vision of the indigenous landscape that is untamed Bali. Tall grasses and wild banana palms swerved their bundled blades and tattered fronds as the robust afternoon breeze thrashed through overgrown greens. Visions of rustic, vernacular charm naturally loomed over the anticipated villa destination. My imagination was about to be hushed.

The vocals of a loquacious mynah bird occasioned an arrival greeting minutes later. A blue entrance door opens up to both Villa Herlien and Beo - the pet Asian starling in a stilted, pitched roofed cage. Sitting proudly on a 1,500 square metre sloping site overlooking Jimbaran Bay, this hilltop bungalow is in fact more urbanely modernist that vernacularly enchanting. Even absent are the anticipated pitched roofs that are often associated with typical "Bali style" houses. It is thus with curiosity that I wonder whether Herlien - with her own individualist demeanour and surprises - might just be unlike the others.

Building up about 800 square metres in ground floor area, and designed by Bali and Singapore-based architect Cheong Yew Kuan, the overall massing had taken a cue from the owners' initial allocation of spatial programmes. This being the second collaboration between owners and architect, the former trusted the latter's professional expertise to proceed with the overall design.

On first impression, Herlien seems deceptively erratic, as differing spots around the premises yield unexpected prespectives. it offers quite a visual trip of multiple perceptions. On plan, however, the strategy of simply adding a little twist to a basic logic is more apparent - two divorced masses are linked by third element that becomes the point of focal interest, offering countless moments of visual surprise. The elevations are also layered with instances of unpredictable projections and recessions, by virtue of central design rupture.

The public and private zones are arranged into two separate wings that negotiate their collective articulation with the site contours. The public "living" mass is a double-storey block more immediate to the entrance, while the private "resting" wing is grounded by the basement gym further down the gradient. These two realms are linked by the sweeping expanse of a second floor terrace which, from plan view, is shapped like a boomerang. A narrow strip of shelter works like a hinged joint connection the two blocks. One block pivots slightly away from the other to form an abtuse letter "L" as if consciously opening up the angle to facilitate a wider view. Curved edges conceived to swiftly mitigate the stoic rectilinear forms have also infused both circulation routes and architectural forms with a greater sense of fluidity.

Downstairs from the enterance is a casual foyer with a view through and beyond. An elongated glass box on the left wraps around the perimeter, which is marked out by round columns. Inside, the TV room can receive guests from the foyer deeper into its comforts. Timber shelving (filled with DVDs on one side) demarcates the space belonging to the office behind. The office further steps out to a small terrace porch. With its skin of merbau-framed glazed panels on both storeys, this public wing opens out length-wise to almost a gallery view of the infinity-edge lap pool below and the surrounds beyond.

Back outside at the pebble-wash-floored foyer, one's attention is unwittingly drawn to a timber installation opposite the squawking mynah. It is composed of five pieces of timber of various heights. The tallest of them bears patriarchal symbolism and gestures towards the holy Mount Agung with a deliberate axial orientation. This piece is only temporary, however, taking the place of the real McCoy - a petrified stone piece soon to be on its way from Jakarta. The other timber pieces, in order of the owners' familial hierarchy, curiously represent the owners' twenty-year-old and one-year-old sons respectively. After the owner was informed that four is an inauspicious number to accommodate as it means death in some Chinese dialects, the fifth and shortest piece was incorporated to (hopefully) herald the coming of a much desired daughter.

Adjacent to this installation lays the only flight of stairs to the floor above. They wind around a void over the kitchenette-bar below that leads back out to the foyer. Top-hung glazing brings daylight into the otherwise dim stair core. At the summit, the stairs arrive at the hinge of the two wings. To the right, just across the terrace expanse is the master bedroom in the private wing. To the left is a short corridor that expodes into the main living volume beyond a framed doorway. Either way, a brief experience through differing spatial qualities ensues; the body quickly experiences the contraction and explosion of architectural spaces.

These enclosed upper storeys are generous volumes with the structural members of their traditional pitched roofs visible overhead. At the far end of the large living room, beyond the merbau timber-framed glass doors and under converging roof ridges, boundaries are erased as the terrace tip unabashedly yearns for the ocean. The northern orientation here offers an uninterrupted panoramic view of Jimbaran cove to the east. From the lawn below this very spot, an upward shot of the villa resembles a worm-like form thrusting out from two glass boxes and into your camera lens.

Spirited in her gleeful palette of pastels from muted ivory to peach, Herlien is in essence modern in language and interpretation. In contrast to most other sprawling villas ensconced in tropical lusciousness and with a more vernacular distinction, some might say that Herlien exudes a more urban state of mind with an "elevationist" disposition. If not for her site-specific condition, she might have easily existed in any other urban city tropical Asia, such as Kuala Lumpur or Singapore. Nevertheless, when the colour of the evening sky pervades over the Bukit and permeates graciously throughout Herlien's open stature, one's heart is swiftly filled by and awakened with a sense of magnimous peace.