Amandari

Peter Muller, an Adelaide architect of the Sydney School, began imagining a hotel in the manner of a Balinese highland village in 1970, when few visitors went to Ubud, and spent almost twenty years looking for someone who believed travellers would leave the coast for the hills. He had already shown at the Kayu Aya, on the beach, which the Oberoi group later bought, that traditional Balinese forms could be made comfortable. After Amanpuri opened in Phuket in 1988, Aman took up his idea, and by the group's account he drew Amandari in eight days. It opened in 1989 on the rim of the Ayung gorge at Kedewatan.

The plan is a village more than a hotel: freestanding pavilions under alang-alang thatch, reached by paths, and a pool shaped like a rice terrace, which Aman calls the first infinity pool on Bali. The things guests found in the rooms, hand-woven fans, Kamasan paintings, coconut-wood pillars and temple sarongs, were new to visitors then and have been copied across the island since, and Muller's obituary credits him, with Sri Lanka's Geoffrey Bawa, as an inventor of what is now called Bali style. In 2010 he was honoured as a modern undagi, the Balinese word for a master builder. OKYTO's where to stay in Bali sets the Ayung valley against the coast, with Four Seasons at Sayan further along the same river.

The village never moved out. The reception has an open roof, and people from Kedewatan pass through it carrying offerings to a seventh-century shrine; 129 steps lead down to a moss-covered stone tiger that guards it, and the resort helps keep the Pesiraman temple at the river's edge, whose tiger statues inspired its own. Half the staff come from the village. Every afternoon since 1989, from three to four, the village's children have practised Balinese dance at the Lotus Pond Pavilion, and some of the first of them now teach their own.

Sources: Aman; Aman; ArchitectureAU