The table
Breakfast is what came off the farm that morning, cooked on a flame the farm made too. Dinner takes as long as the conversation does. Walkers heading down to the falls can stop in for coffee, so the village shares the room with you.
Highland Estate · Munduk, Bali
Two hours north, Bali goes quiet.
Eight villas and a working farm beside a waterfall in the Munduk highlands. Opening 2028.
997 mThe rim
Pack a jumper. You are going to need it.
Munduk sits a kilometre up on the wet north side of Bali’s mountains, two hours from the beaches of the south. Most mornings the cloud drifts through the trees at window height, and by evening the air has dropped to eighteen degrees.
Below the villas, the Red Coral waterfall drops through forest so thick you hear it long before you find it. Springs rise out of this hillside and keep running all year, even in the driest months. That water will light the villas and feed the farm, then carry on down the mountain the way it came.
- ~1,000 m
- At the rim
- 18°
- The nights
- All year
- The springs run
- Under 10%
- Of the land built on
The name
A dragon keeps the water under this mountain.
In Balinese belief his name is Sanghyang Naga Basuki. He moves the water through the springs beneath the peaks, and wherever it comes out, the ground below grows rich.
When we asked the pemangku and the banjar whether the estate could carry his name, they gave it their blessing. We took that as our job description. Let the water give us light on its way down, and send every drop of it back to the land.
952 mThe sanctuary
What is coming · 2028
Picture the end of your first day here.
The fire is lit and your plunge pool is steaming in the cold air. Through the glass there are tree ferns, a bank of cloud, and somewhere below you, the sound of Red Coral falling. The lamps above you are running on that same water.
There will be eight villas: seven with one bedroom and one with two, each set on its own on the slope so that none looks into another. Each one is made from reclaimed Indonesian hardwood, built in a workshop and carried up the hill, so the forest around it is barely touched. Basuki is reserved for guests 16 and over.
The rooms are made for sleep. The lights warm and dim with the sun, the blinds shut out the morning completely, and the bed is dressed in organic linen, cotton and bamboo with a weighted blanket on top. The wiring is laid to keep EMF low, and the water is restructured before it reaches your tap.
You fall asleep to the waterfall, and it is still going when you wake.
Recovery
Stay in the sauna until you can’t, step into the cold plunge, then lie down in the mist with nowhere you need to be. Treatments are given low on the slope, where the cloud sits thickest.
The farm
Walk the rows with our head gardener in the morning. Pick a ripe cherry off the branch, and by the afternoon you can drink the coffee a few metres from where it grew. What the kitchen doesn’t use goes back onto the rows.
Designs are in progress and will change.
How it runs
Your day here runs on this hill.
Power from the stream, gas from the kitchen, and every scrap back into the soil. Follow one day and you will see where each part of it comes from.
Light
6:10
The first lamp
Lit by the stream, through a small turbine. The sun tops it up.
Water
7:30
The shower
Your villa cleans its own water and gives it back to the soil.
Fire
8:15
Breakfast
Cooked on gas the kitchen made from yesterday’s scraps.
Soil
16:00
The coffee rows
Whatever is left is composted and goes back under the coffee.
Food
19:30
Dinner
What the farm grew today. What you leave goes back to it.
We are designing Basuki to run without the grid. The engineering is underway, and the details will change as we build.
How each part works
For anyone who wants the detail. Our build partner has made these systems for off-grid estates before, and is adapting them to this hillside.
Light
A small turbine sits in a channel beside the stream. Part of the water is led through it, turns it, and rejoins the stream a few metres on, so none of it is used up. The stream never stops, so neither does the turbine. Solar panels on the roofs carry more of the load in the dry months, when the stream runs lower.
Water
Water from the showers and basins drains to a planted filter bed below each villa. Gravel, roots and the bacteria living on them clean it as it moves through, and the clean water soaks back into the hillside. Toilets run to a sealed treatment system, kept apart from the gardens.
Fire
Kitchen scraps and farm waste go into a sealed tank called a biodigester. With no air inside, bacteria break them down and give off gas, which is piped to the kitchen and burns like any gas stove. What is left in the tank is a rich liquid fertiliser, and it goes onto the coffee rows. That is how the kitchen’s scraps end up back in the soil.
Soil
Whatever the digester cannot take, like prunings, coffee pulp and husks, is composted on the farm together with the fertiliser from the tank. A few months later it goes back under the coffee and the fruit trees, so the soil gets richer each year.
Food
Coffee, fruit, vegetables and spices grow in that soil. The kitchen cooks what the farm gives it each day, and what is left after dinner starts the loop again.
Already growing
Saffron is already flowering on the slope.
So is the coffee. Vanilla climbs the shade trees, clove and fruit grow along the edges, and the bees work all of it.
Our head gardener has looked after plantations in Munduk since 2007, and he decides what goes in next. More coffee comes first, then cacao, and finally a kitchen garden for the table.
From the estate
Taste Basuki two years early.
The villas open in 2028. The coffee is ready sooner. It is robusta and arabica grown in the Munduk highlands and on our own slope.
The first bags go to Bali and Australia. Saffron, vanilla, clove, honey and blue lotus tea from the same slope will follow, and cacao once the young trees are bearing. Leave your email and we will tell you the day the coffee is ready, and as each of the others arrives.
You are on the coffee list. We will email you once, on the day it is ready.
Organic threads, picked by hand from each flower and dried slowly in small batches. A pinch will colour a whole pot of rice.
Saffron
Threads
Organic pods, cured slowly in small batches until they are soft, dark and heavy with seed.
Vanilla
Whole pods
Organic buds picked just before they open, dried in the highland sun and sorted by hand for the best of the crop.
Clove
Whole buds
Raw honey from hives in the forest and between the coffee rows. Organic, never heated, taken off in small batches.
Honey
Raw forest
Organic cacao from young trees on the slope, fermented and dried in small batches for chocolate. It comes once the trees are bearing.
Cacao
Chocolate
Organic blue lotus flowers, dried whole in small batches for a soft, floral tea at the end of the day.
Blue lotus
Flower tea
The range will change as the farm grows.
The making
Watch it come up out of the ground.
We write from the land as things happen: the plantings, the first walls, the first meal out of the kitchen. Follow along and by the time you arrive, you will already know the place.
October 2026
The first estate coffee
The first coffee from the slope goes off to be roasted.
September 2026
The masterplan, drawn
Eight villas set into the slope with our architects.
September 2026
The boundaries walked
We walked every corner of the land with the land office to measure it.
August 2026
The name, blessed
The pemangku and the banjar gave the estate its name.
The hands
The people you will meet.
The guardian family
They keep this land and are partners in the estate. Their company will run the days here, so the people who cook your breakfast live in the village down the road.
The farm
Our head gardener has tended plantations in Munduk since 2007. His team plants, picks and teaches.
The house
Your stay is run by a hospitality lead with twelve years of looking after guests in Bali.
The kitchen
Miche Fox, a Green Michelin-trained chef, herbalist and sustainable systems architect, is bringing it all together. She is designing the menu around what the farm grows and training the chef who will cook it here, on site.
Stewardship
One percent of everything we earn stays on the mountain.
It goes into a Steward Fund, and the family and the banjar decide how it is spent. The estate stays in one piece, farmed and run as a whole, with buildings on less than a tenth of the land. It makes its own power, and its waste goes back into the soil.
928 mThe falls
First nights · 2028
Eight villas open in 2028. The people on this list hear first.
Tell us what would bring you here, and join our newsletter, a short letter from the land now and then. You will hear first when the first season opens, before it is announced anywhere else. Leave with one click, any time.
You are on the list.
You are on our newsletter. You will hear first when the first season opens.