Cap Karoso

Sumba is not the easy Indonesian answer, and Cap Karoso is built on that. The island keeps Marapu, an ancestral religion far older than anything standing on the coast, and its villages, weaving and ceremonies are the reason to make the flight to Tambolaka and the 50-minute drive west.

The resort answers with 40 rooms and 20 villas in which Sumbanese craft sits beside contemporary art, a coral-reef shoreline and turquoise lagoons at the end of the lawn, and a farm on rehabilitated land that grows very nearly everything the kitchens use. Dinner at Julang is handed to visiting chefs; the Beach Club holds the long afternoons; Apicine works in eastern Indonesian flavours. The island supplies the substance, and the resort has the sense not to stand in front of it.

An island with its own beliefs

Marapu, still practised across Sumba, gives the island a texture no resort could manufacture: high-roofed villages, weaving passed down within families, ceremonies that answer to the calendar rather than to visitors. Cap Karoso sits on a coral-reef shore with lagoons and traditional settlements around it, near enough to make the encounter easy and far enough not to intrude on it. The beach is the counterweight, and it is a very good one.

Craft, held to a modern line

The rooms and villas are furnished as though the island had been consulted: woven textiles and hand-worked timber against clean contemporary forms, with art and design commissions filling the walls that craft does not. Studios and Terrace Studios suit two; Beach Suites bring the shore closer; the villas run to several bedrooms and a pool, which is how a family or a party of friends should take Sumba. The effect is polished without ever turning generic.

Three hectares, then the table

The farm is the working heart of the place: three hectares of rehabilitated land producing nearly all the fruit and vegetables that reach the restaurants and the bar. Julang turns that supply over to visiting chefs, who arrive with their own ideas and cook a short residency around what Sumba can give them. Apicine looks east through Indonesian flavours, and the Beach Club keeps matters simple between swims. Few resorts this remote eat this well.