Bvlgari Resort Bali

When Bulgari announced a resort in Bali in November 2003, it was to be the second hotel of Bulgari Hotels & Resorts, after Milan, and its first resort. The Italian jeweller licensed its name and Marriott's luxury group was to run the hotel, while the developer was MRA Group & Partners, the Indonesian company that held the franchise for Bulgari's boutiques in the country. Planned for mid-2005, it opened in September 2006 with 59 villas, each with its own plunge pool and garden. It now goes by the brand's current spelling, Bvlgari Resort Bali.

The estate covers 8.4 hectares on top of a 160-metre limestone cliff on the southern coast of the Bukit peninsula, near the village of Pecatu and the clifftop temple of Pura Luhur Uluwatu, with the airport and Jimbaran Bay about twenty kilometres to the north. This is the far south of the island, about 50 minutes by car from Kuta, and the beach below the resort can be reached only by its inclined lift. OKYTO's Bali guide covers the island's main bases.

Photo: Jorge Láscar / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0

Since May 2025 the fine-dining room has been Il Ristorante – Niko Romito, the resort's outpost of the Italian chef. The spa, with six treatment rooms, includes a joglo, a traditional Javanese house relocated to the cliff from Java.

Antonio Citterio's office, then Antonio Citterio and Partners, designed the resort. "The challenge with the Bali resort was to create a unique experience," Citterio said, and it had to be "true to the place and not a picturesque representation of it". Habitus compared the result to a medieval hilltop fortress, with a Hindu temple at the highest point of the site in keeping with Balinese custom and furniture designed and made in Bali by local designers and artists. The walls are hand-cut volcanic stone and white coral stone from the Bukit, and the pools are lined in green Sukabumi stone.

Sources: Pambianco; Hotel Online; Hotel Executive; Breaking Travel News; Habitus; Forbes Italia; Bvlgari; Bvlgari Resort Bali