A Quite Long History of Bali Hotel Architecture Part II: Geoffrey Bawa and Peter Muller
On the way back from a trip to Paris in 1971, Donald Friend went back to Sri Lanka and visited Geoffrey Bawa’s Lunuganga Estate and his recent works, including Bentota Beach Hotel. After reading Geoffrey’s new works, he was convinced that Geoffrey was the best architect in Asia at the time, so he decided to let Bawa participate in the project.
Geoffrey Bawa was actually not familiar with Donald Friend before. When Donald lived in Bevis Bawa’s house, he showed the working state of a typical artist: a workaholic, working and drawing pictures day and night, and various unfinished sketches here and there. But in any case, Geoffrey impressed Donald with his works . They began to cooperate closely.
In 1973, Geoffrey Bawa followed Donald to the Bali research base, and was familiar with the architectural style and characteristics of Bali. The first buildings Donald took him to see were Klungkung’s courtyards and water palaces. These impressive historical buildings in Bali have also become important inspirations and references for Geoffrey Bawa’s creation in Bali.
Geoffrey Bawa finally came up with his proposal. Each of the 15 plots covers an area of about 4000 square meters, and each plot has a 30-meter-long beach in front of it. Although each plot is designed separately, it follows a unified pattern: the entrance to the street on the side away from the coast is an entrance courtyard with a garage and a servant area; in the middle of the plot, a living loft is arranged around a pool. The plot is enclosed and limited by walls, and a small attic is arranged in the garden area. A door leads to the beach and the sea.
The main ceiling of each plot is also a new interpretation of the Balinese architecture proposed by Geoffrey Bawa: the pavilion is located on a raised stone base, and the roof is a Balinese thatched roof, an open pavilion supported by slender teak pillars, lead to a closed room. The rooms are masonry of gravel and coral reefs, and the surface is painted with plaster. Geoffrey Bawa applied the extensive knowledge of traditional Balinese architecture accumulated by Donald over the years to his design, creating a new prototype that is more aesthetically disseminating and practical.
Although the vision of the entire project is magnificent, in fact, only the museum on Lot 5 (where Villa Batujimbar is located) and House A on Lot 6 and House C on Lot 11 were built according to Geoffrey Bawa’s vision.
The arrival of Geoffrey Bawa made the small circle of architects and artists brought by Donald Friend in Bali more lively. In this circle were his Australian architect friend Peter Muller, as well as famous people in the tourism and hotel industry at that time, Adrian Zecha. In the end, young Kerry Hill was also invited to join this circle. Here, Kerry Hill was fortunate to know one of his biggest design and architecture heroes, Adrian Zecha and Geoffrey Bawa.
The designs of Geoffrey Bawa and Peter Muller influenced Kerry Hill’s early immature architectural views. He detailed some similarities and differences between the design ethos of Geoffrey and Peter.
Geoffrey Bawa’s design style mainly came from the Bali palace architecture. After he used the traditional Balinese architectural language such as alang alang thatch and open gallery as the key features of his design, all of these elements are so practical and financially affordable — of course, the use of these thatched houses is quite technical. A thatched roof of poor quality can only last for 5 years, while a well-built thatched roof can last for more than 25 years. Therefore, the overall design style of the Batujimbar Estate is not only driven by aesthetics, but also driven by pragmatism
Geoffrey Bawa’s design is more of a refinement of the Balinese architectural style, and he emphasised great importance of the space and context between architecture and landscape. His use of the water courtyard continues his practice in Sri Lanka, including sketches, sculptures, and landscapes in gardens. Outdoors and indoors together create a vacation and leisure style with Southeast Asia and Bali.
Peter Muller puts more emphasis on the construction process, craftsmanship, and materials. The architecture style produced in this way achieves a sense of Bali through another way. Peter Muller’s first actual project in Bali was not smooth. It was finally sold to someone in 1973 and renamed Kayu Aya Hotel. But the entire hotel is undoubtedly an upgraded version of the Matahari Hotel he originally designed for Donald and Wija in 1970 . The use of a large number of traditional Bali house elements and decoration methods also happens to satisfy the imagination of foreign tourists about the style of Bali. The Kayu Aya Hotel would later become the template of future Balinese holiday villas.
By the mid 1970s, the Indian-based Oberoi group bought the Kayu Aya Hotel and Peter was commissioned to design its transformation into the The Oberoi Bali. It opened in 1978, becoming the first genuinely five-star luxury beachside resort in Bali and before long enticing the likes of Mick Jagger, Henry Kissinger, Salvador Dali, Gianni Versace and David Bowie.
Peter Muller used traditional Balinese thatch for roofing, natural stone and ornate wood carvings lending an authenticity to luxury lanai (open-sided verandah buildings), rooms and villas.
One of his chief objectives was to produce a resort that employed local people in its construction and that sat as inconspicuously possible beside the then small local village. And at one point during the construction of The Oberoi Bali, the Australian architect employed 600 Balinese labourers, tradesman and artisans. It was the first time large numbers of Balinese derived real financial benefit from tourism to the island.
1970s can be said to be a very important decade for the history of modern architecture in Bali. In this decade, Geoffrey Bawa worked hard to travel between Bali and Sri Lanka to refine the overall planning and individual design of the Batujimbar Estate project while also helping Palmer & Turner to design certain element of Bali Hyatt.
Together with Geoffrey Bawa and Palmer & Turner, Kerry Hill was perfecting the final interior layout of Bali Hyatt-the hotel is about to open in 1974. And Peter Muller took a fancy Kayu Aya Hotel project, the first of its kind on Bali’s west coast — together they built the first generation of modern Balinese tropical hotels that would later influence the design of countless hotels in throughout Southeast Asia.
In 1990s, Peter Muller and Wija Waworuntu were planning to develop a proposal for prestigious US-based luxury wellness resort operator, Canyon Ranch. The project encompassed a 100-room international 5-Star hotel incorporating advanced purpose-built health and spa healing facilities to be situated on an 80 hectare ocean-front site.
The Canyon Ranch complex needed to accommodate private housing sites including individual villas and grouped guestrooms complex, which shared resemblance with Tandjung Sari’s swastika village bungalow layout design.
Contract for the project were let and and work proceeded up to floor level when it suddenly terminated due to the economic crash in Asia. Located in Pantai Antap, the project would have been the first major hospitality establishment in Tabanan, West Bali, preceding Waka Gangga by two or three years and Alila Villas Soori (now Soori Bali) by over ten years!
Peter Muller and The Oberoi also collaborated once again for three more hotels but only The Oberoi Lombok saw the light of the day, being opened in 1997. The other two hotels were not built for unknown reason (The Oberoi Ubud and The Oberoi Bedugul).
Note:
Room inventory and facilities mentioned on this post are based on the actual situation during the opening year of the hotels.
A Quite Long History of Bali Hotel Architecture
This ten-part 130-minute blog story is made as a tribute to the hospitality world of Bali, and to the people who love and live it.
The story, more or less, chronicles the milestones of Bali hospitality and hotel architecture from 1930s to 2010s, celebrating the works of renown hoteliers and architects Wija Waworuntu, Geoffrey Bawa, Peter Muller, Kerry Hill, Adrian Zecha, Hendra Hadiprana, Jaya Ibrahim, WATG, John Hardy, Ketut Arthana, and Andra Matin among others.
Each part is illustrated with images, sketches and site plans, including old photos of Tandjung Sari, Batujimbar Estate brochure, photo series documenting the construction of The Oberoi Bali and Amandari, Kerry Hill’s original design for the Regent Jimbaran Bay (eventually came into being as the Four Seasons Resort Bali at Jimbaran Bay).
There are also footages of Ronald Reagan’s meeting with Suharto in Nusa Dua Beach Hotel, Geoffrey Bawa’s unused site plan for the expansion of Bali Hyatt, TV commercials, World Bank’s proposal for the development of BTDC extracted from a 400-page BTDC-World Bank document containing mail correspondences, bills, and researches, and thirteen volumes of GHM’s late 90s publication: The Magazine — A Style to Remember.
