the java house

A brief stroll from the Master Suite, the Java House is simpler, more delicately fanciful – a charming chocolate box of a house on stilts, sided with panelling in bold geometric patterns that was salvaged from a joglo, a nineteenth-century hand-carved house in Central Java. Gorgeous color runs riot here: the alternating cartouche and almond-shaped joglo panels are painted in harmonious shades of lime

and forest green; the bed, a reproduction of a rare eighteenth-century Dutch colonial bedstead from a Javanese palace, is an intense China red; a fine antique screen carved with the bizarre, humorous characters of the Javanese shadow-puppet theatre is painted in traditional polychrome. Lanterns hanging overhead, based on the hanging lamps in a synagogue in Cochin, throw patches of restful blue and turquoise light across the polished teak floors and the exposed thatch and bamboo-beamed roof.

A half-walled breezeway leads to the spacious, open-plan bathroom, furnished with an antique marbletop vanity and cupboard; the rain shower is tiled in Made Wijaya’s signature mosaics. A wooden deck fronts the house, perched on stilts high above the gorge, with an unobstructed view of a thousand-year-old temple in the distance, so perfectly positioned that it could be a garden folly in the classical tradition; but in fact it is the only pre-existing structure visible at Villa Keliki, giving the prospect a sense of scale.