Inside a Bali holiday home, dreamed up by a French journalist for her family

An hour’s drive northwest of Canggu, Bali’s latest trendy holiday hot spot, and a rice paddy away from the Indian Ocean is a stylish slice of heaven named Balian Prana. This is the holiday home of French journalist Marie le Masne de Chermont, her husband, Raphael (former executive chairman of Shanghai Tang), their grown-up children, Jade and Corentin, and their many guests.

The 1,200-square-metre site comprises five buildings and a 25-metre, infinity-edge swimming pool set on a grassy slope over­looking rice fields and surf breaks near Balian. As well as the two-storey main house – with its open living and dining spaces, kitchen, verandas and two guest bedrooms – there’s a building for the master suite, complete with an office on the first floor, and a single-storey structure with two rooms, for the children. A staff house and a geladak – a small, traditional wooden house constructed from several old buildings – complete the compound.

Le Masne de Chermont stumbled across the site while Corentin was surfing at nearby Balian.

“My son was out surfing all day, I got bored and went looking for land. I didn’t intend to come so far out, but Canggu is developing and changing so rapidly,” she says. “Balian means ‘magic healer’. It’s a special place, the Bali you expect to find when you come from far away. It’s a small village with a couple of restaurants and lots of handsome surfers doing yoga. And everyone’s in bed by 10pm. I love it!

“We are 100 metres from the sea and 50 metres above sea level, so we’re safe from tsunamis. There are rice paddies between the house and the beach, and the view changes as the crop grows and changes colour. We’re on the west coast, so we have stunning sunsets, and the beach is 50km long, so we can walk for hours.”

After meeting 10 architects (“Many were doing modern concrete cubes and I didn’t want that”), le Masne de Chermont clicked with Balinese architect Kadek Dirga. But as a veteran of many reno­vation projects, in Hong Kong and France, the vision for Balian Prana was all hers.