(CNN) – Bali first captured the heart of Kayti Denham when he came to the Indonesian island for his honeymoon in the 1980s.
“When the plane’s door opened onto the tarmac, the dizzying tropical aroma promised everything Britain hadn’t done,” she recalls. “The chance to be kind and sunny.”
He held that memory close and returned to the island from time to time to reconnect. The marriage did not last, but Denham says he fell more deeply in love with Bali than he ever had with a man.
After 25 years in the UK, Denham moved to Byron Bay, Australia, where he launched a range of aromatherapy skin care products with a friend. Later, in Sydney, he worked with a local production company as a screenwriter.
We are moving forward to 2004, when Denham left Australia for a teaching job in Bali, which led to a number of positions in international schools on the island. She continued to take writing commissions on the side, including a stint letter to Scottish chef Will Meyrick, founder Sarong and Mamasan, two of the island’s most famous locavore restaurants.
Robi Supriyanto: musician, environmental activist and earth-positive coffee farmer.
Kayti Denham
A lifelong lover of live music, Denham crossed paths with Robi Supriyanto, frontman for the popular Balinese rock band Navicula. In Indonesia, Supriyanto is known not only for its grunge-inspired energetic performance, but also for its involvement in sustainable agriculture and its efforts to encourage pride in agricultural life, the passions Denham shared through her work with Meyrick and studies. with permaculture guru Bill Mollison in Australia.
“If you want to know Balinese culture, open up the traditional Balinese calendar,” Supriyanto told CNN in 2018. “It’s all about farming. If you want to preserve Balinese culture, you have to preserve agriculture.”
Denham discussed such ideas with Supriyanto, who lives in Ubud, Bali, with his American wife and child.
“We talked about how nice it would be to set up a home farm where you could practice permaculture and grow organic produce,” she says. “For me, it probably comes from the fantasies I had when I was reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books as a child.”
“I had to work on trust and get people to trust me”
The Tabanan Regency in Bali is known for its rice terraces.
SONNY TUMBELAKA / AFP / AFP via Getty Images
Supriyanto helped her find a semi-rural property in the Tabanan region, often referred to as the “true Bali”, where terraced rice fields follow the country’s natural outlines, with the dormant volcano of Mount Batukaru in the background.
Family stone-walled compounds use subak, the irrigation control system based on the Balinese community, for their farms.
Here Denham could make his dream come true. She formed a partnership with Supriyanto to secure the land in 2015 and, through a lawyer, entered into contracts designating Denham and his daughters Kepsibel and Severen, both of whom live in Australia, as legal tenants.
“I didn’t have a lot of money to invest, just my monthly teacher salary,” says Denham. “I had to work on trust and make people trust me. The phrase I kept saying was ‘It will work.’
The 1.2-hectare property is located near the National Conservation Forest near Desa Sanda, a village that, as Denham says, “lives by seasons and rituals, market days and motorcycles.”
Denham rented land surrounded by durian and mango orchards in a village that “lives by seasons and rituals.”
Kayti Denham
Surrounded by durian and mango orchards, the plot deviates from misty wooded hills into a valley and through a terraced coffee farm inherited as part of the acquisition, before ending in a natural spring. The spring flows into the Balian River, sacred among Balinese, as the 16th-century Javanese Hindu sage Dang Hyang Nirartha placed his staff in the river, giving it the power to heal the sick. The river flows into the Indian Ocean at Balian Beach, famous for its unpleasant surfing scene, a 40-minute drive away.
“I can’t see the ocean from land, but it’s cooler on the hills,” says Denham. “Beautiful clouds roll in the afternoon, and at night the sky is often clear and bright.”
Finding the right release
Two years after acquiring the land, Denham and Supriyanto traveled to central Java to find a limasan, a traditional wooden house with a millennial design history in Java and South Sumatra.
The high and curved roofs collect warm air that rises during the day, keeping the lower living area cool. Nowadays, they are popular with developers who adapt them into luxury villas or boutique hotels, but Javanese locals are less than happy with maintaining old structures and are happy to sell them wall to wall.
Denham’s house was reassembled in a T-shape.
Kayti Denham
Denham found a vacant limasan in the former royal capital of Surakarta, commonly known as Solo today, and after negotiating a price – $ 7,000 – hired artisans to dismantle the house, load it into a truck and delivered over 600 kilometers to Bali, which cost about $ 650.
The Javanese crew arrived in shorts and T-shirts, and Tabanan’s cold mountain air took them by surprise.
“I went to the country shortly after they had to reassemble the limasan to find them trembling around a fire,” says Denham. “We rounded up blankets, sweaters and jackets and built a shelter for sleeping. But in addition to the fact that we didn’t go to the mountain weather, there was tension between them and the local Balinese.”
Eventually, the Javanese went home to Solo, and Denham finished the house with the help of Ketut, a Balinese craftsman who worked at the house he had rented in Kerobokan.
She continued to teach how to maintain funds to build her dream. Whenever possible, she drove from Kerobokan to Desa Sanda with her builder Ketut to monitor progress.
When finished, the re-assembled and expanded T-shaped house measured 11 by 10 meters in front and 22 by 5 meters in the back. An interior toilet was added, and Denham began moving into antique furniture, bookcases, and trunks.
The interior began to take shape, starting with a huge kitchen centered on a large table with 12 seats.
“I had another foothold in the world of expat-oriented international schools, but I began to get closer to the Sanda community and hear about their desire to make the village an eco-tourism destination,” says Denham. “On the way home, there’s an organic bakery that makes fresh bread and cakes to sell to cafes in the south. We also found locals who make organic jams, handmade soaps and shampoos.”
A local craftsman protects the mold (the traditional rattan straw ceiling).
Kayti Denham
To develop the land surrounding the house, a group of locals and expats, including a number of former international students from Denham, organized a “Permablitz”, a kind of fast-paced permaculture event. They built bamboo warehouses with long-drop toilets and started working on an organic vegetable garden while camping and playing music with the locals in the evening.
Seeing that the property was filled with coffee, cocoa, durian, mangosteen and avocado, all organically grown, Denham felt that her dreams blended effortlessly with those of the community.
Kept away from the pandemic
In July 2018, Denham flew to Australia to take up a teaching job in a remote desert town, returning to Bali during school holidays to continue working at home. She spent most of her Christmas vacation in 2019 moving the rest of her worldly possessions from Kerobokan, where the lease had ended, to Sanda.
She has made a decision that, rather than unpacking, she will store everything safely and give herself the opportunity to immerse herself in the ambiance of her beautiful home, with its antique wooden living room, spacious kitchen and spare locking room where he kept his material life.
“The rain fell, the leaves dripped, the birds rang, the edges screamed and nothing else happened, except for one night when a hunter took shelter from the rain and gave me a little fear. But those last days in the house were nothing more than heavenly. “
He flew back to Australia after Christmas to resume teaching, telling his friends in Bali, “See you in April!”
When April 2020 came, unexpected pandemic travel protocols left Denham stranded in Australia. It’s been over a year since he got home in Bali. At the moment, Denham says “I live from WhatsApp messages. I am sent pictures with my beautiful house in the big, empty forests and waiting for my return ”.
A local family takes care of the house in her absence. Not long ago, Robi’s band recorded a live music video in the garden. The coffee farm produces robust, ecological and sustainable.
“Some of that coffee came to my doorstep last week,” says Denham. “Every time I make a cup, he picks me up in a place I haven’t lived in yet, but I’ve been dreaming of for years.”