(CNN) – Bali first captured Kayti Denham’s heart when she came to the Indonesian island for her honeymoon in the 1980s.
“When the plane’s door opened onto the tarmac, the intoxicating tropical scent promised everything the UK didn’t,” she recalls. “The chance to be happy and sun-drenched.”
She kept that memory close and occasionally returned to the island to reconnect. The marriage did not last long, but Denham says she fell in love with Bali more than ever with a man.
After 25 years in the UK, Denham moved to Byron Bay, Australia, where she and a friend launched a range of aromatherapy skincare products. Later in Sydney she worked as a screenwriter for a local production company.
Fast forward to 2004, when Denham left Australia for a teaching job in Bali, which led to a series of jobs with international schools on the island. She continued to take on writing assignments, including a short writing assignment for Scottish Chef Will Meyrick, founder of Sarong and Mamasan, two of the island’s most celebrated locavore restaurants.
Robi Supriyanto: musician, environmentalist and earth-positive coffee farmer.
Kayti Denham
A lifelong live music enthusiast, Denham crossed paths with Robi Supriyanto, frontman of the popular Balinese rock band Navicula. In Indonesia, Supriyanto is known not only for his energetic grunge-inspired performances, but also for his commitment to sustainable agriculture and his efforts to encourage pride in farm life, passions Denham shared through her work with Meyrick and studied with permaculture guru Bill Mollison. . in Australia.
“If you want to get to know Balinese culture, just open the traditional Balinese calendar,” Supriyanto told CNN in 2018. “Everything is about agricultural elements. If you want to preserve Balinese culture, you also have to preserve agriculture.”
Denham discussed such ideas with Supriyanto, who lives with his American wife and child in the town of Ubud, Bali.
“We talked about how nice it would be to set up a home farm where you can practice permaculture and grow organic produce,” she says. “For me it probably stems from fantasies I had when I read Laura Ingalls Wilder books as a kid.”
“I had to work on trust and people trust me”
Tabanan Regency in Bali is known for its rice terraces.
SONNY TUMBELAKA / AFP / AFP via Getty Images
Supriyanto helped her find a semi-rural home in Tabanan Regency, often referred to as ‘the real Bali’, where terraced rice fields follow the natural contours of the land with the dormant volcano of Mount Batukaru in the background.
Stone-walled family complexes use subak, the Balinese community-based irrigation control system, for their farms.
Here Denham could make her dream come true. She partnered with Supriyanto to secure the land in 2015, and through a lawyer drafted contracts designating Denham and her daughters Kepsibel and Severen, both living in Australia, as legal tenants.
“I didn’t have a ton of money to invest, just my monthly tuition salary,” says Denham. “I had to build trust and let people trust me. The phrase I repeated to myself over and over was ‘it will be okay’.”
The three acres of grounds border national protected forest near Desa Sanda, a village that, as Denham puts it, “lives from seasons and rituals, market days and motorcycles”.
Denham leased a piece of land surrounded by durian and mango orchards in a village that “lives according to seasons and rituals.”
Kayti Denham
Surrounded by durian and mango orchards, the plot slopes down from misty forested hills to a valley and through a terraced coffee farm inherited as part of the purchase, before ending at a natural spring. The spring flows into the Balian River, sacred to 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 tranquil surfing scene, 40 minutes away by car.
“I can’t see the ocean from land, but it’s cooler in the hills,” says Denham. “Beautiful clouds roll in in the afternoon and the sky is often clear and clear at night.”
Finding the right clearance
Two years after they acquired the land, Denham and Supriyanto traveled to Central Java to find a limasan, a traditional wooden house with a millennium-old design history in Java and South Sumatra.
The high hipped roofs trap the warm air that rises during the day, keeping the lower living area cool. They are popular today with developers who adapt them into luxury villas or boutique hotels, but Javanese residents are less interested in maintaining the old buildings and are happy to sell them wall by wall.
Denham’s reassembled T-shaped house.
Kayti Denham
Denham found an empty limasan in Surakarta’s former royal capital, commonly known today as Solo, and after negotiating a price – $ 7,000 – hired artisans to dismantle the house, load it into a truck, and load it over 600. miles to Bali, which costs about $ 650.
The Javanese crew arrived in shorts and T-shirts, and the cool mountain air of Tabanan surprised them.
“I went to the country, shortly after they had to put the limasan back together, to see them shiver around a fire,” says Denham. “I packed blankets, sweaters and coats together, and we built a sleeping quarters. But besides not taking the mountain weather into account, there was also tension between them and the local Balinese.”
Eventually the Javanese went to Solo, and Denham finished the house with the help of Ketut, a Balinese craftsman who had worked on the house she rented in Kerobokan.
She continued to teach to save money for building her dream. Whenever possible, she drove her builder Ketut from Kerobokan to Desa Sanda to monitor progress.
When completed, the re-assembled and expanded T-shaped house was 11 by 10 meters in the front and 22 by 5 meters in the back. An indoor toilet was added and Denham began moving furniture, bookcases and antique suitcases.
The interior started to take shape, starting with a huge kitchen centered around a large table for 12 people.
“I still had a foothold in the expat-centric international school world, but I started to get closer to the Sanda community and heard that they wanted to make the village a destination for ecotourism,” says Denham. “Down the road from the house is an organic bakery, which makes fresh bread and pastries to sell to cafes in the south. I also saw the locals making organic jams, handmade soaps and shampoos.”
A local craftsman makes the cover (traditional rattan-wicker ceiling) mold resistant.
Kayti Denham
To develop the land around the house, a group of local residents and expats, including some of Denham’s former international students, organized a “Permablitz,” a type of fast-attack permaculture event. They built bamboo outbuildings with long toilets and started working on an organic vegetable garden while camping and playing music with the locals in the evenings.
Seeing that the property was packed with coffee, cocoa, durian, mangosteen and avocado, all organically grown, Denham felt her dreams merge effortlessly with those of the community.
Held away by the pandemic
In July 2018, Denham flew to Australia to take a teaching job in a remote desert town and returned to Bali during school holidays to continue working on the house. She spent most of her 2019 Christmas vacation moving the rest of her worldly goods from Kerobokan, where her lease had expired, to Sanda.
She decided that, instead of unpacking, she would put everything away safely and allow herself to sink into the atmosphere of her beautiful home, with its antique wooden living room, spacious kitchen and extra lock-up room where she stored her material life.
“The rain was falling, the leaves were dripping, the birds were calling, civets were screaming and nothing much happened, except one night when a hunter was hiding from the rain and scaring me a bit. Nothing short of heavenly.”
She flew back to Australia after Christmas to resume teaching and said to her Bali friends, “See you in April!”
When April 2020 came, the unexpected pandemic travel protocols left Denham in Australia. It has now been over a year since she has been to her home in Bali. At this point Denham says, “I live on WhatsApp messages. I am being sent pictures of my beautiful home in the great forest, empty 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 organic, sustainable robusta.
“Some of that coffee arrived last week,” says Denham. “Every time I make a cup, it lifts me to a place where I have not lived yet, but have been dreaming of for years.”