(CNN) – Bali won Kayti Denham’s heart for the first time when she came to the island of Indonesia for her honeymoon in the 1980s.
“When the plane’s door opened on the runway, the intoxicating tropical scent promised everything the UK didn’t promise,” she recalls. “The chance to be playful and sunbathe.”
She kept that memory close, and returned to the island from time to time to reconnect. The marriage didn’t last, but Denham says he fell in love more deeply with Bali than ever with a man.
After 25 years in the UK, Denham moved to Byron Bay, Australia, where he launched a line of aromatherapy skin care products with a friend. Later, in Sydney, she worked with a local producer as a screenwriter.
Moving forward to 2004, when Denham left Australia to work as a teacher in Bali, which led him to a series of positions at international schools on the island. She continued to receive parallel writing orders, including a short essay for Scottish chef Will Meyrick, founder of Sarong and Mamasan, two of the island’s most famous locavore restaurants.
Robi Supriyanto: Musician, environmental activist and coffee farmer positive for the land.
Kayti Denham
A lover of live music for life, Denham crossed paths with Robi Supriyanto, lead singer of the popular Balinese rock band Navicula. In Indonesia, Supriyanto is known not only for his grunge-inspired energy performances, but for his involvement in sustainable agriculture and his efforts to encourage pride in agricultural life, passions that Denham shared through his work with Meyrick and studies with the guru of permaculture Bill Mollison in Australia.
“If you want to get to know Balinese culture, just open the traditional Balinese calendar,” Supriyanto told CNN in 2018. “It’s all about agricultural elements. If you want to preserve Balinese culture, you also need to preserve agriculture.”
Denham discussed these ideas with Supriyanto, who lives in Bali’s Ubud city, with his American wife and son.
“We talked about how good it would be to establish a farm where you could practice permaculture and grow organic products,” she said. “For me, it probably comes from fantasies I had when reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books as a child.”
“I had to work on trust and make people trust me”
The Tabanan Regency of Bali is known for its rice terraces.
SONNY TUMBELAKA / AFP / AFP via Getty Images
Supriyanto helped her find a semi-rural property in the Regency of Tabanan, often called “the real Bali”, where terraced rice fields follow the natural contours of the land with the dormant volcano of Mount Batukaru in the background.
Familiar stone-walled compounds employ subak, the Balinese community-based irrigation control system, 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, made contracts that designated Denham and his daughters Kepsibel and Severen, both resident in Australia, as legal tenants.
“I didn’t have a pile of money to invest, just my monthly teacher salary,” says Denham. “I had to work on trust and get people to trust me. The phrase I repeated to myself over and over was ‘It will work’.”
The 1.2 hectare property abuts a nationally conserved forest near Desa Sanda, a village that, as Denham puts it, “lives according to the seasons and rituals, market days and motorcycles”.
Denham rented land surrounded by durian and mango orchards in a village that “lives on seasons and rituals”.
Kayti Denham
Surrounded by durian and mango orchards, the land descends from misty wooded hills in a valley and through a terraced coffee farm inherited as part of the purchase, before ending in a natural spring. The fountain flows into the Balian River, sacred among the Balinese because 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 deserted surf scene, 40 minutes away by car.
“I can’t see the ocean from the land, but it’s cooler on the hills,” says Denham. “Beautiful clouds appear in the afternoon, and at night the sky is usually clear and clear.”
Finding the right limasan
Two years after acquiring the land, Denham and Supriyanto traveled to central Java to find a limasan, a traditional wooden house with an ancient design history in Java and southern Sumatra.
The gabled roofs collect the warm air that rises during the day, keeping the lower living area cool. They are popular today with developers who adapt them to luxury villas or boutique hotels, but Javanese locals are less delighted with the maintenance of old structures and are happy to sell them wall-to-wall.
The T-shaped house reassembled from Denham.
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 – he hired craftsmen to dismantle the house, load it in a truck and deliver it for more. 600 kilometers to Bali, which cost about $ 650.
The Javanese crew arrived in shorts and T-shirts, and the cold mountain air of Tabanan took them by surprise.
“I went to the property shortly after they were supposed to gather the limasan to find them shaking around a fire,” said Denham. “I rounded up blankets, sweatshirts and jackets and built a shelter to sleep in. But, in addition to not taking it to the mountain climate, there was tension between them and the local Balinese.”
Eventually, the Javanese returned home to Solo, and Denham finished the house with the help of Ketut, a Balinese artisan who had worked at the house she rented in Kerobokan.
She continued to teach to keep funds to build her dream. Whenever possible, she drove from Kerobokan to Desa Sanda with her builder Ketut to monitor progress.
When it was completed, the house was reassembled and enlarged in the shape of a T measuring 11 by 10 meters in front and 22 by 5 meters behind. An indoor bathroom was added, and Denham started fiddling with antique furniture, shelves and chests.
The interior began to take shape, starting with a huge kitchen centered on a large table for 12 people.
“I still had a foothold in the international school world geared towards expatriates, but I started to get closer to the Sanda community and to hear about their desire to make the village an ecotourism destination,” says Denham. “On the street in front of the house, there is an organic bakery that makes fresh bread and cakes to sell in cafes in the south. I also found locals making organic jellies, handmade soaps and shampoo.”
A local artisan protects the bedek (traditional wicker thatched roof).
Kayti Denham
To develop the land around the house, a group of residents and expatriates, including several international students from Denham, organized a “Permablitz”, a kind of permaculture fast-attack event. They built outdoor bamboo houses with long-drop toilets and started working in an organic garden, while camping and playing music with the locals at night.
Watching the property fill with coffee, cocoa, durian, mangosteen and avocado, all organically grown, Denham felt that his dreams easily merged with those of the community.
Away from the pandemic
In July 2018, Denham flew to Australia to work as a teacher in a remote outback desert town, returning to Bali during school holidays to work more at home. She spent most of the 2019 Christmas vacation transporting the rest of her material goods from Kerobokan, where her rent had ended, to Sanda.
She decided that, instead of unpacking, she would keep everything safe and give herself the opportunity to immerse herself in the ambience of her beautiful home, with its old wooden living room, spacious kitchen and security room where she kept her material life.
“The rain fell, the leaves dripped, the birds sang, the seaweed screamed and nothing else happened, except one night when a hunter took shelter from the rain and gave me a fright. But those last few days at home were nothing short of heavenly. “
She flew back to Australia after Christmas to resume classes, saying to her friends from Bali: “See you in April!”
When April 2020 arrived, the unexpected travel protocols for a pandemic left Denham stranded in Australia. It has been over a year since she was at her home in Bali. At that point, Denham says, “I’m living on WhatsApp messages. I get pictures of my beautiful home in the big, empty forest and waiting for my return.”
A local family is taking care of the house in your absence. Not long ago, Robi’s band recorded a live video clip in the garden. The coffee farm is producing robust sustainable and organic.
“Some of that coffee came to my door last week,” says Denham. “Whenever I prepare a cup, I am taken to a place where I have not yet lived, but which I have dreamed of for years.”