Buried pleasure on a Bali hillside
EIGHTEEN months ago, an architect called John Heah stood on a hillside in Bali, looked at the building he had designed, which was being carved out of the earth, and experienced a few moments of panic. 'It was raining, the site looked like Vietnam and it was scary. And everyone got a bit worried, doubts were being expressed by various parties . . . That was the most difficult part of the project.' Three years earlier Heah, born in Singapore and educated in England, had landed himself a plum design job. His client was the Singapore businessman Ong Beng Seng who had acquired a rice terrace in Bali which he wished to turn into a boutique hotel as part of the Four Seasons Group. The site was practically next door to the Amandari in Ubud and, as Heah was only too aware, all the Aman resorts had dramatically heightened people's expectations of hotel design.
'You can't not talk about the Aman group's success as a concept chain,' he says frankly, on a recent visit to Hong Kong. 'The thought was how to penetrate that market.' What he came up with at Sayan was a hotel so tiny (18 suites and 28 private villas) and so discreet, that visitors don't realise that it's there until they're on top of it. Literally.
'Everything is subterranean. When I was young I was influenced by the works of Capability Brown, the Victorian landscape gardener. His idea was that you never see a building immediately; you should always frustrate the visitor. So when people arrive at Sayan, they think 'This is it? Have I made a mistake?' 'At first, it's a botanical experience: they go through a bamboo tunnel and a frangipani grove and yet they never quite see the building. And then they reach a tiny courtyard, there's a 55-metre-long bridge over a lily-pond the size of two tennis courts, and when they look down it's like a rice-bowl. And we chose to build at the bottom of the bowl.' Heah was aware that this was a risky venture. 'Sayan is totally radical and there was a lot of hum-ing and haw-ing about it at the beginning. But the whole idea was that it's up in the mountains and that you should be as close to nature as possible but still have the Four Seasons experience. Basically, it's for CEOs who were hippies in the 1970s.' The mild irony about such a bucolic idyll is that Heah's own background is exceptionally hi-tech: he was one of the first architects to use computers as an aid to design and he set up his own studio in 1989 when the architect Richard Rogers gave him space in exchange for help with computer facilities. When he moved to Singapore to pursue a project, he met Ong Beng Seng and worked with him on a proposal for a boutique hotel near Alkaff Mansion, which was later refused planning permission and has not been built.
Two years later, however, when the Four Seasons project came up, Heah was summoned to Singapore and given a week to convince Mr Ong that he was the man for the job. As it happened, Mr Ong's wife, Christina (who owns half of London's Bond Street and has had a considerable impact on fashion retail in Southeast Asia) had an empty shop on Orchard Road and was persuaded to make it available to Heah for four days. He created a cube of muslin in the middle, down-lit it 'like a lantern', plumbed in Balinese music and made his design presentation to Mr Ong on a Friday. On Monday, he was told he had the contract.
The Four Seasons group seems to have been even more speedy in its assessment. The vice-president flew in to London from Toronto for three hours and because Heah's office is tiny, the meeting took place next door, in the famed River Cafe (which is co-owned by Richard Rogers' wife). This turned out to be a wise choice. 'He said, 'Because the cappuccino's so nice we'll go with this project',' recalls Heah with a grin. And that was that.
The simplicity of Sayan has, of course, been achieved as a result of tremendous effort. There is no paint: all colour is derived from natural materials.