Top Bucketlist Hotels in Bali

The Tranquil Traveller

Ulaman is a village of bamboo: twenty curved villas woven into a pocket of jungle and rice field in Tabanan, the exterior singled out at the Prix Versailles in 2021. Most villas have a private saltwater pool, and the spa is built underground, with a steam room, a sauna and a rooftop hot tub. It is the least remote stay here, about fifteen minutes from Canggu, but the site closes in around you and the architecture does the rest.

Location

Tabanan, Indonesia

Tranquility Index

73 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Sidemen is the Bali people mean when they say the island used to be quieter: a valley of rice terraces and weaving villages in the east, under Mount Agung. Wapa di Ume has twenty-one rooms and pool villas terraced into the hillside, each with a balcony over the fields, a two-tier infinity pool at the centre and a daily run of Balinese cultural activities included. It is the most modest stay on this list, and for setting alone one of the most rewarding.

Location

Sidemen, Indonesia

Tranquility Index

77 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

The twin-tier infinity pool cantilevered over the Ayung gorge is one of the most photographed hotel pools anywhere, and it is the reason most people first hear of Hanging Gardens. Behind the picture is a genuinely wild site: a forty-five-degree jungle slope at Payangan that took some seven hundred craftsmen to build on in 2005, with forty-four pool villas stepped down it and three funiculars instead of footpaths. It is dramatic rather than restful, and worth it for the setting alone.

Location

Payangan, Indonesia

Tranquility Index

80 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Buahan takes the open-air Balinese pavilion to its logical end: sixteen bales in the hills north of Ubud with no walls and no doors at all, each with a private pool and an uninterrupted view across the forest to Bali's seven peaks. It is adults only, the kitchen is farm-to-table, and the spa follows Ayurvedic lines. The no-walls idea reads like a gimmick and turns out to be the opposite, a stay with nothing left between you and the valley.

Location

Payangan, Indonesia

Tranquility Index

88 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Hoshinoya's first resort outside Japan is set into a river gorge in eastern Ubud that falls 170 metres to the Pakerisan. Thirty villas form a tight village around three seventy-metre pools laid out like the irrigation canals that cross the site, part of Bali's UNESCO-listed subak system. The design is Japanese in its bones and Balinese in its materials, with gazebos cantilevered over the valley for reading or the eight-course jungle dinner. It is an exacting, quiet sort of stay, closer to a retreat than a resort.

Location

Ubud, Indonesia

Tranquility Index

83 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Mandapa is Four Seasons Sayan's neighbour in the Ayung valley and its closest rival: a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, of which there are only a handful worldwide, on twenty-four acres at Kedewatan that still farm three acres of rice. The open-air lobby stands three hundred feet above the river; twenty-five villas with private pools line the water below, thirty-five suites the slope above, and every guest gets a butler. The riverfront spa runs multi-day wellness and detox programmes for people who want the stay to actually change something.

Location

Kedewatan, Ubud, Indonesia

Tranquility Index

87 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

Amankila means peaceful hill, and it delivers on the name. Thirty-four thatched suites stand on stilts down a forested slope above the Lombok Strait in east Bali, ninety minutes from the airport and far from the island's crowds, with Mount Agung behind and a private black-sand beach below. The three-tiered pool cut into the cliff is one of the most copied in Asia, but the real point of the place is how little is asked of you.

Location

Manggis, Indonesia

Tranquility Index

95 / 100

The Tranquil Traveller

The main building wears a lotus pond on its roof, and it is only past it that the valley the resort is built into comes into view. Sixty suites and villas drop down a wooded slope toward the Ayung River, the villas freestanding with their own plunge pools and the sound of moving water never far off. The Sacred River Spa sits down on the bank. It opened in 1998 and still sets the standard for a jungle stay in Bali: close enough to Ubud for dinner, deep enough in the trees that you rarely leave.

Location

Sayan, Ubud, Indonesia

Tranquility Index

92 / 100