Quiet writing from the cliff — on architecture, food, the garden, and the people of the Bukit. Published when there is something to say.
In the eighteen months between the diagnosis and the day he stopped drawing, the late tropical architect Made Wijaya filled sixty-three sketchbooks with what would become Samudra. He did not live to see the building. The story of how the resort was completed in his absence — drawn from the sketchbooks themselves and from conversations with his collaborators — is a meditation on what a building knows that its architect did not get to.
Read the Essay →Three hundred and twenty species, a single gardener, and a kitchen that changes its menu daily based on what is ready before lunch. A long afternoon walking the three acres with Ibu Made.
The general manager's quarterly note. On the rain, the new boatman, and an unexpected visit by a cardinal from Rome.
The Brahmin priest of Pura Luhur Uluwatu on the meaning of beauty and what the cliff has watched for nine hundred years.
An afternoon at the salt pans of Kusamba with Pak Wayan, who harvests the salt for all the kitchens at Samudra and three other restaurants in Bali.
Every clay pot at Samudra was thrown by hand at the village of Pejaten, fifteen kilometres north. A profile of the seventy-two-year-old potter Ibu Komang.
The sommelier Daniel Wirja on four years of buying wine for a kitchen with no signature dishes — a problem requiring a particular sort of cellar.
Pak Wira, our resident yoga teacher, on the three kinds of silence and why the second one is the one to be afraid of.
Seventeen months in a yard in Sulawesi. The story of the resort's twenty-eight-metre phinisi, told by the man who built it from a tree.
A short list from the in-house library, refreshed each season. This spring: Joseph Conrad, Pramoedya, Han Kang.
The architect's decision to build the resort around an existing spring rather than reroute it. An essay on restraint.
“The cliff has been here for nine hundred years, and the temple for half of that. We have been here for four. The first lesson is the order of these numbers.”
— Ida Pedanda Made, in conversation with Tania AndersonA short letter from the general manager, four times a year, on what we are reading, growing, and serving at the cliff. No promotions, no offers.
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