The Apurva Kempinski Bali

Some resorts hide their size; The Apurva Kempinski wears it like a costume. On the cliff at Nusa Dua, 465 rooms, suites and villas are spread among tropical gardens above the Indian Ocean, arranged around an open-air theatre that gives the whole property the air of a performance in progress. It is Balinese in reference and grand in execution, the Kempinski instinct for ceremony translated into carved wood and ocean light.

Within that scale there is real choice. Rooms and suites come with deep soaking baths and rain showers; the residential villas suit a family or a week. Koral serves dinner inside an aquarium, Reef Beach Club keeps the shoreline sociable and The Apurva Spa works with the Indonesian traditions of lulur and jamu. Nothing here is small, and nothing is careless.

A resort built like a theatre

The open-air theatre is not a flourish added to a hotel; the hotel seems to have been arranged around it. Gardens and the chapels that share the grounds take their cue from that sense of staging, and the ocean, seen from the top of the cliff, plays the backdrop. It gives an address of 465 keys something unusual: a centre. Guests arrive, take their bearings from the theatre and the sea, and the scale turns from daunting to legible within an afternoon.

Rooms, suites and residential villas

The accommodation runs from ocean-facing rooms to suites and residential villas, the last of these the category for a family or a week, with living space arranged for people who intend to stay in. Throughout, the fittings are decided on the side of indulgence: deep soaking baths, separate rain showers and a pillow menu for the particular. Terraces look over the gardens to the water, and the best mornings begin on them, before the resort has fully woken and while the Indian Ocean is already lit.

Dinner inside an aquarium

Koral is the table that gets talked about. The dining room sits inside an aquarium, so the light is blue, the walls move and the plates arrive to the slow traffic of fish; the hotel asks for reservations in advance, which says most of what needs saying. Izakaya by Oku takes the evening in a Japanese direction, Bai Yun and L’Atelier by Cyril Kongo change the register again, and Reef Beach Club holds the daylight hours on the sand, with the ocean a few steps away.