This tropical Bali dream house, located in Padanggalak, 3 miles north of Sanur, is what my husband Mel and I like to call our 'third child' (we also have 2 boys). Building on our cross-cultural marriage, we chose to blend the open-air feel & tropical materials of Mel's native Indonesia with the exposed wood, open floor plan, & cathedral ceilings of the old barns of my native rural Massachusetts.
Before building, we'd spent years renting houses in Bali, so we were very clear what we did not want. We wanted to avoid the sort of villa you see all over the island that is built to look romantic - open-air, no doors, thatched roofed - but is in fact very impractical. Coming from New England where the winters are so rough, I'd always thought of the tropics as gentle, but those houses taught me that a tropical climate has its own hazards: bugs, dust, mosquitoes, ants, mold, gecko's, smoke from burning fields, & a very fast pace of decay. In the open houses, we couldn't keep nature out because there was no way to close in the space. Mosquitoes were abundant, & the thatch would shed, & the geckos living in the thatch would contribute their own fall-out. We'd essentially spend a good part of each day just sweeping up!