The Leaf the Forest Grew

There is a moment, in the Balinese construction tradition, when the bamboo roof is raised and the building, for the first time, casts shade. The workers stop. The master carpenter — always a man called Wayan or Ketut or Made, the first names the island gives its fourth-born and first-born — walks the perimeter. He is listening, though a visitor would not know it. He is listening for whether the building has found its place. If it has, he says nothing. He lights a stick of incense at the centre post and goes home.

The villa above the Ubud gorge passed its test on a Tuesday. The master carpenter, whose name was Wayan — like the client, like half the men on the island — lit the incense and left. The client, whose name was also Wayan, stood under the great leaf of the bamboo roof and understood what his grandfather had been trying to tell him for forty years.

## What the grandfather said

The grandfather had been a rice farmer in Tegallalang, two valleys north. He had never built anything larger than a rice granary. But he had, in the way of Balinese grandfathers, a theory of buildings, which he gave to his grandson in fragments over thirty years. A building, he said, should be like a tree. It should give shade. It should let the wind through. It should not insult the ground it stands on. When it is finished, the forest should not know it is there.

Wayan the grandson had left the village at seventeen. He had worked in hotels in Kuta, in Seminyak, in Singapore. He had become, by his late thirties, the manager of a resort whose concrete and glass would have struck his grandfather as a particular kind of violence against the island. He had made money. He had lost the thread.

The call came from his mother. The land above the gorge — two hectares of jungle and disused rice terrace, held by the family for three generations — was being eyed by a developer. If Wayan did not act, the forest would become a villa complex of the kind the island had too many of. Wayan, who had spent twenty years building other people's concrete hotels, flew home.

## The leaf

He did not want to build a hotel. He wanted to build the thing his grandfather had described — a building that was also a tree.

We worked with him for a year. The form that emerged was a leaf: a single great curved roof of structural bamboo, spanning the full width of the villa, oriented to the gorge and the prevailing breeze. The bamboo — the giant species that reaches maturity in four years, that rivals steel in tension, that the island has always built from because there was nothing else — was harvested within fifty kilometres, treated with natural borax, and joined by the carpenters whose families have worked the material for generations. The roof, from the jungle path, reads as a leaf. The forest, from the villa, is the fourth wall.

The materials, by Wayan's rule, were zero-mile. River stone for the floors and the sinks, carved by masons from the next village. Hemp for the renders and the finishes — a crop the island had grown for centuries and that contemporary low-carbon construction has rediscovered. Reclaimed coconut palm for the boardwalk between the villas. No concrete above the foundation. No steel. No imported finish.

## What the building does

The villa is off-grid. The leaf roof, by design, is a rainwater catchment — every drop that falls on its great curve runs to a stone cistern beneath the plinth. Solar panels on the service canopy provide the electricity. The greywater runs through a reed bed back to the jungle. The kitchen garden, between the villas, grows the herbs the kitchen serves. In steady state, the villa produces no waste and sequesters more carbon than it emitted — the bamboo, growing back on the harvested hillsides, pulls more from the atmosphere than the construction released.

The cooling is passive. The leaf roof funnels the breeze. The deep eaves shade every opening. The raised stone plinth holds the night's cool. There is no air conditioning. In the Ubud climate, at this elevation, there is no need for it.

## The incense

The hotel opened with three villas. Wayan — the client, not the carpenter — lives in the fourth, which he kept for himself. He told me, on the terrace, one evening when the mist was lifting off the gorge and the jungle was doing the thing it does at that hour, which is to become a single wall of green so dense it reads as a surface, that the hotel had taught him something his grandfather had known and he had forgotten.

"I spent twenty years building hotels that looked at the place," he said. "This hotel is the place. My grandfather said a building should be a tree. I thought he meant the shape. He meant the relationship. The building gives shade. It lets the wind through. It does not insult the ground. When it is finished, the forest does not know it is there."

He paused. The incense at the centre post — the one the carpenter had lit, the day the roof found its place — was still burning, in the Balinese way, three sticks at a time, every morning, by the woman who cleaned the villa. The forest, from the terrace, was a wall of green. The villa, in it, was indistinguishable from the next leaf.

Some buildings are built on the land. The rare ones are built with it, and the rarest, when they are finished, the forest claims as its own.