Location: Pererenan, Bali, Indonesia

Design Team: Alexis Dornier

Area: 990 m²

Year: 2025

Photography: KIE

Design Features: Villa Suki stands in Pererenan, Bali, and was designed by Alexis Dornier. A perfect square is rotated 45 degrees within the near-rectangular plot, creating a family of triangular gardens between the house and its boundaries. Landscape is not treated as a leftover perimeter. Together, the central void and peripheral gardens establish the order of a tropical residence that looks outward while remaining anchored by a quiet interior core.

At ground level, a lightly elevated volume shelters an inhabited terrain rather than a residual undercroft. Reading areas, conversation pits and a television lounge are linked by subtle changes in level and flow around the central courtyard. A solitary bonsai, lit from above by a skylight, becomes the visual anchor of both plan and movement. As people circulate along the edges, their presence is registered indirectly through shadows, framed views and shifting light.

Four bedrooms occupy the upper floor, each facing outward to a garden and paired with an en suite bathroom. The circulation around the void preserves visual contact without compromising the rooms' independence. Separate guest houses are arranged as single-storey bungalows whose slightly irregular geometries respond to the plot boundaries. Skylights activate the resulting corridors and residual pockets, turning constraint into a sequence of illuminated thresholds.

The house's most emphatic element is a monolithic stair set slightly off the square's governing axis. Clad in locally sourced Kerobokan volcanic stone, its circular opening cuts light and perspective through a weighty mass, countering the apparent levitation of the horizontal upper floor. A small pool and open deck on the roof extend the domestic landscape vertically, establishing three scales of occupation: the inward courtyard, the surrounding gardens and the more exposed sky.

Dark timber, stone and locally sourced marble form a restrained, tactile palette, while layered windows and partitions soften the transition between interior and garden. The design draws on Japanese modernist concerns for proportion, clarity and framed space without reproducing a fixed style; those principles are recast through Bali's tropical climate and vegetation. The name Suki suggests affinity or refined preference in Japanese, and the house gives that idea spatial form through geometry, light and carefully measured relationships between people and landscape.

Design Team: Alexis Dornier is a Bali-based architecture and design practice led by its namesake founder. Established on the island in 2013, the studio works across residential, hospitality and cultural projects as well as product design and spatial installations, with commissions in Indonesia and internationally. Each project begins with a central architectural idea that coordinates structure, form, interiors and detail.

Rather than beginning with a fixed style, the studio develops rules from climate, landscape, material and construction. Sun, humidity, rainfall, ventilation and long-term durability are considered alongside cultural context and local craft. Structural clarity, expressive rooflines and close attention to making have become recurring threads across otherwise varied work.