Bvlgari Bali

On a clifftop at Uluwatu on the Bukit Peninsula of Bali, Bvlgari Resort Bali occupies a position above the Indian Ocean where the limestone cliffs fall sixty metres to the surf below, with the resort’s 59 villas terraced into the cliff face to give each accommodation an unobstructed view across the ocean that has no equivalent in Bali’s resort landscape. The architecture, designed by Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel, applies the Bvlgari aesthetic of pale stone, dark wood, and bespoke Italian craft to a Balinese context that honours the island’s own material traditions — hand-carved teak, hand-painted Balinese decorative objects, locally woven textiles — without subordinating them to the international luxury register of the brand. The result is one of the most coherent expressions of Italian design intelligence applied to a Southeast Asian cultural context.

Il Ristorante by Luca Fantin, the Michelin-starred outpost of the Bvlgari’s Tokyo chef, serves Italian cuisine prepared with seasonal produce from across Indonesia and Bali in a dining room whose ocean-cliff position is among the most dramatically located in the world. The Bvlgari Spa draws on Indonesian healing traditions alongside the brand’s proprietary wellness protocols, and the clifftop infinity pool — ninety metres above the Indian Ocean — is among the most photographed hotel pools in Asia for good reason. The Uluwatu Temple, one of Bali’s holiest sea temples with the legendary Kecak fire dance performed on the cliff edge at sunset, is a short drive from the resort.

Bvlgari Resort Bali represents the most complete expression of the maison’s hospitality vision available outside Europe, with the combination of the clifftop location, the quality of the culinary programme, and the precision of the material execution creating an experience whose distance from the conventional Bali resort typology is as large as the gap between the cliff and the ocean below.