Alexis Dornier Rotates a Bali Villa 45 Degrees to Carve Triangular Gardens on Every Side

Villa Suki starts from a single geometric decision. Alexis Dornier, the Uluwatu-based architect who has shaped much of Bali's contemporary residential vocabulary, took a perfect square plan and turned it 45 degrees on its plot in Pererenan. The 990 m² house, completed in 2025, no longer lines up with its boundaries. That leaves four triangular gardens around it, and each face of the building gets its own outlook instead of a front, a back and two leftover sides.

The rotation is the hook, but the section is what makes the house worth studying. At ground level the main volume reads as a single storey held slightly above a built landscape. Beneath and around it, the living spaces sink into the ground through small changes in level: reading nooks, conversation pits and a TV lounge, all arranged around a central courtyard. Bedrooms sit upstairs with their own garden views. The result is a villa organised by topography and light more than by corridors and walls, and we think it is one of Dornier's most disciplined plans to date.

A Square Turned on Its Corner

From above, the strategy is easy to read. A pyramidal white metal roof caps the square, with a glazed skylight at its apex and a small plunge pool tucked into the roofscape. Because the square sits on the diagonal, its corners push toward the site edges and its faces pull away from them, so the gaps between building and boundary become planted triangles rather than thin side setbacks.

The pool follows a different logic. Its wave-shaped edge and a triangular stone platform soften the geometry where water meets lawn. It is a sensible counterweight: the plan is strict and the landscape is allowed to curve.

A Lifted Upper Floor and Deep Timber Soffits

The upper floor cantilevers past the ground-level glazing, and its underside is lined in timber. These deep soffits do practical work in Bali's sun and rain. They shade the glass below and turn the perimeter into a covered threshold rather than a hard edge. Glass balustrades keep the upper level visually light, so the darker cladding and warm timber read as one floating band above the garden.

Seen through banana leaves and palms, the house is never fully revealed from one point. That is the privacy argument behind the rotation in practice: views come in fragments, and the vegetation does the screening that a perimeter wall would usually do.

Living Set into the Ground Plane

The interiors make good on the sectional idea. A sunken sofa sits beneath a slatted timber ceiling, and a tufted leather bench and low table anchor the pit. Sliding glass doors open straight onto planted terraces. You sit low and the garden sits at eye level, which changes the room more than any furniture choice could.

Riem Studio's interiors stay restrained: round woven rugs, leather and woven lounge chairs, and stone-clad shelving. The palette lets the bamboo garden and the pool take over the floor-to-ceiling glass. The lounge areas feel like a series of shallow terraces, separated by a step or two rather than by walls.

Triangular Gardens and Water

The triangles left over by the rotation are treated as rooms in their own right. A timber deck runs beneath the overhang to a stone basin fountain, boulders and a gravel edge. Elsewhere, dense planting of palms and bird-of-paradise presses against the curving pool. Bali Landscape Company had real territory to work with here, and they used it to bring greenery into every part of the plan, including a grass-topped roof that shows up behind the pool.

Water appears repeatedly at a small scale: fountains, basins, a plunge pool, the main pool. Each is placed where you would naturally stop, at a step, a deck edge or a threshold. It works because none of it is ornamental excess.

Masonry as Counterpoint

Against all the glass and timber, Dornier places heavier elements. A rough volcanic stone wall holds up a planted palm terrace and throws leaf shadows beside the glazed dining room. A board-marked wall, pierced by a single circular window, stands like a tower between the timber-screened rooms.

These pieces give the composition weight and a sense of age it would otherwise lack. The round window in particular reads as a deliberate signature: one opening, perfectly framed, set against a facade that is otherwise all horizontal glass.

The Stair as a Light Well

The vertical circulation gets as much care as the living rooms. An open timber-tread stair on black steel stringers rises beside raw concrete and hanging metal mesh curtains, lit from above. Further up, speckled stone walls, a skylight and a lit handrail turn the climb into a slow change of light conditions.

A round window returns on the landing and links the stair to the masonry tower outside. It is a small move, but it shows the house was conceived as a single set of motifs rather than room-by-room decoration.

Bedrooms with Their Own Outlook

Upstairs, each bedroom gets an en suite bathroom and a view of its own garden, which the rotated plan makes possible without any room facing a neighbour's wall. Black steel-framed glazing opens onto timber decks pressed up against dense foliage, and teak floors carry the warmth of the soffits inside.

The bathrooms take a quieter approach: open showers, black fixtures, and tall angled plaster walls that drop daylight down from above. Privacy comes from the section, so the rooms do not need to close themselves off.

After Dark

At blue hour the composition flips. The timber soffits glow, the glazed living spaces turn into lanterns, and the pool reflects both. Studio Nimmersatt's lighting picks out the overhang and the cantilever without flooding the garden, so the upper floor still seems to hover over the dark landscape.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings show more than the photographs. The site plan places the main house and a separate two-unit studio villa on a diamond-shaped plot, with three pools, a carport and a gate. At ground level the main house wraps a central garden. Upstairs, five bedrooms ring a central void, so the courtyard reads through both floors.

The roof plan shows that the hipped slopes are not a closed cap. They surround a rooftop deck with a small jacuzzi and a stair void. The sections cut through the central garden, living room and stair core, and they make the sunken living level and the lifted bedroom floor easy to follow.

The elevations show a long sloping roof wing on the north and east, and on the south and west, the brick tower with its round window, which houses a piano. That one programmatic detail explains why the most solid object on site also gets the most deliberate opening.

Why This Project Matters

Bali's villa market tends to produce a familiar type: a linear pavilion facing a pool, with a privacy wall on three sides. Villa Suki shows how much a single geometric move can change that formula. Rotating the square gives four garden rooms instead of one, makes privacy a matter of landscape rather than enclosure, and gives every bedroom its own view. The diagonal does more work than any amount of finish.

The sectional thinking is just as transferable. By sinking the social spaces into a built landscape and lifting the private floor above it, Dornier puts you at garden level when you are sitting and gives you canopy views when you sleep. For architects working in hot, humid climates on tight residential plots, this is a clear example of plan and section carrying the design, with materials and lighting in support.

Villa Suki by Alexis Dornier, Pererenan, Bali, Indonesia. Area: 990 m². Completed: 2025. Construction: Bali Construction. Landscape: Bali Landscape Company. Interiors: Riem Studio. Lighting: Studio Nimmersatt. Photography: KIE.

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