Step inside this Bali villa, an intimate, yet conceptually expansive home
Sora, a new Bali villa by Colvin Haven, is a private retreat built around restraint, where 'the brief became subtraction'
This Bali villa was conceived around an important, overarching question: What happens when a home is designed strictly around daily nourishment and restoration? Titled Sora, this is the brainchild of locally based creative Andrew Swallow and his studio, Colvin Haven – the minds also behind a past, similarly thoughtful family home, Umah Tsuki.
Step inside Bali villa Sora by Colvin Haven
The two bedroom residence may be relatively compact, but what it lacks in scale it gains in immaculate detailing and construction, an orchestration in hand charred Shou Sugi Ban, local paras stone, and structural recycled Ulin hardwood.
Swallow's aim was to eliminate corridors for more purposeful and streamlined living that remains at all times connected meaningfully with the home's captivating, rich surrounding nature. His solution? To balance the home's arrangement around two central hearths of equal standing and importance in the house.
'Sora began with two things we kept hearing after Tsuki. People wanted that same feeling, only more intimate, and they wanted a more attainable way in. So the brief became subtraction: a two-bedroom home, edited down to only what a life needs, built around a kitchen where people gather and open to the garden. I wanted it to say that a home doesn't have to be large to be generous. The future of residential design isn't measured in square meters, but in how a home restores the people inside it,' Swallow says.
'Tsuki is a four-bedroom family home on a slope, and it already chose restraint over scale. Sora takes that further. It's the first home where smaller had to say more, and the first we built for a client. Tsuki was our own family's home, so Sora tested whether our language could belong to someone else. It can, and it's how we know the language can travel. Two new editions are under construction now, and they'll carry it further.'
One of these hearths sits in the kitchen, representing - physically and symbolically - the family home's core, where residents meet to nourish themselves and informally connect on a daily basis. The second is the home's wellness hub, an area encompassing private cold tubs, steam spaces, and outdoor garden showers, where the owners can fid tranquillity and internal balance.
As for his favourite moment in the house? Swallow explains: 'The walk. It begins in the open-air corridor, where the zen gardens slow every step. Then you come upon the koi, a living art installation, and pass through the kitchen, the heart the whole living area is built around. And then the house opens: rice terraces, and beyond them, the volcanoes. By then you've slowed down enough to take it in.'
The result, Swallow hopes, brings accessible luxury to daily life, without compromising on quality and equally without having to rely on size or imported materials which would feel out of place in Bali's environment.
