Boutique and Luxury Hotels Bali

Bali is a small island that contains a continent's worth of different places, and is currently a victim of its own success. The Canggu rice paddies the Instagram generation came for have been built over with cafés and surf hostels. The Uluwatu cliff road from the bypass to the temple can take an hour to crawl in high season traffic. Anyone who tells you the island is unspoiled bliss hasn't been in a decade or more.

What's still true is older. Hindu Bali — the only Hindu-majority island in the Muslim archipelago — keeps its calendar of temple ceremonies, the full-island silence of Nyepi, the penjor poles raised for Galungan. The subak irrigation cooperatives that water the rice terraces have been running since the ninth century. The cooking has its own grammar of base genep spice paste, banana-leaf wraps, things slow-cooked in earth ovens overnight. The rainy season, December to March, delivers untimely punctuation to a day's plans, not insurmountable but worth knowing. Mount Agung, the volcano that the religion considers the centre of the world, still erupts on its own schedule.

To find the version of Bali worth coming for, you have to plan. Ubud is twenty miles inland and ten years older in feel — the temples, river gorges, palace-trained dancers, the woodcarvers who still work to commission. The Bukit Peninsula's cliff coast at Uluwatu is where the cool surfers head. East Bali on the Lombok Strait is where the south coast used to feel before the south coast filled in. The volcanic highlands at a thousand metres — coffee plantations, lake temples, mist that doesn't lift until ten in the morning — are the rebuke to the southern heat and the true 'old bali' some of the old timers talk of. Each requires its own logistics. Treating Bali as a single destination is how visitors come away exhausted, you might find worse pollution on a motorbike in Canguu than Bangkok.

Tanah Gajah is the editorially defining property in our Bali collection — the former private estate of an Indonesian art collector, now a small boutique resort with twenty suites in working rice paddies outside Ubud, the Tempayan kitchen running on the estate's organic garden. Our Bali collection spans twenty-three properties across ten distinct sub-regions, from cliff-top villas to highland plantation hotels.

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