Location: Tampah Hills, Lombok, Indonesia

Design Team: Caceres + Tous

Area: 304 m²

Year: 2026

Photography: Caceres + Tous

Design Features: House Kala occupies a hilltop within Tampah Hills on Lombok's southern coast. Designed by Caceres + Tous as a four-bedroom retreat for eight guests, it responds to an almost continuous panorama of ocean, forest and distant hills with a complete circular plan. Rather than choosing one privileged frontage, the house follows sunrise, sunset, wind and horizon while preserving a quiet inward centre within an exposed landscape.

Rooms are arranged along the outer perimeter. Bedrooms occupy the eastern arc for gentler morning light, while living, dining, kitchen and leisure spaces turn southwest toward the sea and sunset. A continuous corridor follows the central courtyard, where dark timber screens alternately conceal and reveal planting, slowing the approach to each room through a sequence of wall, shadow and vegetation.

Arrival begins in a smaller circular court that overlaps the main ring. A shallow pool edged with volcanic stone sits beneath an oval roof opening, bringing rain, sky and a framed hillside view into one compressed threshold. Beyond it, deep terracotta columns divide the glazed perimeter. They temper tropical sun while turning the broad horizon into a measured sequence of vertical landscape frames.

The house is lifted over the slope on a limited number of perimeter supports rather than placed on a broadly levelled platform. Gabion and dry-stone construction below the pool absorb changes in grade, while the thin roof remains low against the tree canopy. Structure, shading and topography therefore make the circle more than an image: it becomes a method for limiting earthworks, ordering orientation and controlling scale.

The material palette grows from the colour of Lombok's soil. Tactile terracotta plaster binds walls, columns and built-in elements; dark timber ceilings, blackened joinery and cool grey terrazzo reduce reflection inside. Woven textiles, clay vessels, carved furniture and volcanic stone introduce local craft at an intimate scale, while dense stone surfaces in kitchens and bathrooms add weight and durability.

House Kala reframes the panoramic holiday home as a repeated movement between outward prospect and inward refuge. The outer ring follows light and distance; the courtyard gathers view, air and rain. Its sense of refinement comes less from a sealed luxury surface than from the precision with which spatial order, material depth and natural change are held together on the hilltop.

Design Team: Caceres + Tous was founded in Indonesia in 2015 and is led by architect Nico Caceres and interior designer Kiko Tous. With founders from Chile and Spain and a practice based primarily in Bali, the studio works across residential, hospitality, commercial and leisure projects, treating architecture, interiors, furniture and use as a continuous design process.

The studio describes its method as working from the inside out: everyday function and human experience establish the plan before terrain, sun, wind, orientation, light, texture and framed views are integrated into one system. House Kala concentrates this approach. Caceres led the architecture and Tous the interiors, while form, custom furniture and material choices were developed around the same circular mode of inhabitation.