Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan

Before 1998 the Singapore businessman Ong Beng Seng acquired a rice terrace on the Ayung River at Sayan, "practically next door to the Amandari", as the South China Morning Post put it, and gave it to a Singapore-born architect working in London, John Heah of Heah & Co. Heah's aim was to break into the market Aman had made while staying as close to nature as possible, and he later recalled that the brief was to find the minimum viable number of keys. People called the design totally radical; there was, he said, a lot of humming and hawing at the beginning. The resort opened in February 1998 with 46 suites and villas.

Photo: Fabio Achilli / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0

Heah took his cue from the English landscape gardener Capability Brown: "you should always frustrate the visitor." Guests come through a bamboo tunnel and a frangipani grove, cross a 55-metre bridge above the forest canopy and step onto an elliptical lotus pond that is the roof of the main building; the lobby is beneath it, the building is almost entirely below ground, and nothing is painted, so the colour comes from the materials. "You can imagine the resort literally as a bowl of rice," Heah said, and the rest steps down the gorge to the river. The builders moved trees only at full moon and offered prayers and incense each evening.

There are now 60 keys, 42 villas and 18 suites, and OKYTO's guide to Bali's subak and temples follows the water system the Ayung feeds. Heah regrets that his original interiors, with more local craft in them, have been replaced; the spa reopened in December 2024 as seven villas, Hirsch Bedner Associates reworked seven suites that reopened in July 2026, and Elora Hardy of IBUKU built Sokasi, a bamboo chef's table by the river. The paddy fields on the site were kept in cultivation on purpose.

Sources: South China Morning Post; TTG Luxury; Four Seasons; The Senior; Four Seasons; Hospitality Net; CLAD; Four Seasons; Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan