Growing up in Georgia and spending my adulthood in California, I never—truly never—imagined I’d raise my family in a rose-colored villa in Bali, designed by my husband and my father, with an assist from me. But here I am with my spouse and two kids in a home near Uluwatu, where the view progresses from our pink swimming pool to emerald treetops, sapphire sea, and silhouettes of volcanoes to the north.

Originally, this house was supposed to be my dad’s. I had my own next door. A decade ago, freshly laid off from my magazine editor job in Los Angeles and emotionally depleted from a breakup, I piggybacked on a girlfriend’s trip to the Indonesian island. I swooned over the relaxed lifestyle and within a couple years decided to build myself a home that I could rent out part-time. I found a quiet piece of land with an ocean view, leased it from a Balinese family for 30 years (the only legal option for foreigners), and with my savings and freelance income built a home. My father, Steve Romeyn, an Atlanta home builder and designer, leased the smaller parcel of land beside mine.

A year later, back in L.A., where I was still primarily living, I met Keith Marks, who would eventually become my husband. He is a designer and snow fanatic who had no intention of ever living on a tropical isle, but he visited me in Bali and afterward had a long discussion with my dad about what to do with the plot next to mine. Recently retired and looking to be pushed out of his comfort zone, my father asked his future son-in-law to help design a two-bedroom house for the site. They approached it like an experiment.

“I knew we were in for something different,” remembers my father about the early design meetings. We established a mantra of “when in doubt, do the opposite,” says Keith. Upstairs bedrooms? Put ’em in the garden. Ground-floor living room? Move it up. Tile roof? Make it wood. Open-plan kitchen? Enclose it. Smooth white walls? Texturize.

“I joked with Kathryn, it’s the oldest new home I’ve ever been in. I think it’s the handcraft of the whole thing.”
—Keith Marks, designer and resident

They came up with plans for a house with 1,853 square feet spread across two stacked boxes topped with an angled hat. The entry is flanked by two en suite bedrooms connected by an outdoor corridor. The upper floor is simply a compact kitchen with a dining table, plus an outdoor living room. The most defining move came when Keith said, “You know you have to put the pool upstairs.” We laughed, but he wasn’t joking. Over time the pool grew, shrank, shifted, but it remained in the sky, at the top of the stairs off the second floor of the house’s open face, with a small yoga area beneath it.

During the meandering two-year design process, we worked with architect Corie Saxman, Keith’s professional partner at Ham Design Group, to refine our topsy-turvy idea. She recalls reviewing photos Keith had taken: “He’d show me all these temples that were popping over fences.” The ornate Hindu family temples, which look like carved wooden boxes with fluffy palm roofs, are ubiquitous. Our neighbors’ temple influenced the wooden form of our upper story.

Indonesian references came up again in a special request from my timber-loving father. At his behest, Keith and Corie incorporated a structure evoking a Javanese joglo, a mountain-shaped vernacular house with a roof that sits on four columns topped with tie beams stacked like Lincoln Logs. Although the structures are typically one story, they conceived a double-height version for the foyer with stairs that wrap around massive bangkirai wood columns and lead up to the open-air living room and the enclosed kitchen.

The design process continued with us on-site. With our one-year-old, Indah, we moved full-time to my house next door, saying goodbye to our steep West Hollywood rent. On a bit of a whim, my father changed plans and bought a sailboat rather than build the house, but he proposed that we should be the ones to do it. Just like that, I became my husband’s client.

In early 2023 we broke ground. To clarify some wilder moves, such as giant operable wooden louvers, Keith created a small physical model for our builder, Ngurah Nararya, and his crew. “There was a looseness that I think helped the project get to this interesting conclusion because we were able to make on-the-fly changes,” says Keith of the construction process. The effort was collaborative, as we walked the site regularly, throwing out ideas. A favorite from Ngurah: frameless glass sliders for wide, unencumbered openings.

Still, the build was rife with frustration; going with the flow became critical, and a sense of discovery prevailed. We had planned for the concrete on the outside of the home to be rough and white, but on a trip to the Adirondacks—our only vacation while the house was in the works—I awoke one day to find Keith wearing a serious expression. “We have a big problem,” he said, lifting his phone to reveal that our house was somewhere between blush and flamingo and as smooth as polished marble. The blunder turned into the happiest accident. Corie’s immediate response after seeing it was, “I love it. Can we keep it?” And even before seeing the “mistake” in person we knew we would.

“We embedded Indah’s toddler handprint into our hand-trawled plaster wall—it froze a moment in time.”
—Kathryn Romeyn, designer and resident

The house is unlike anything else in the neighborhood, which is being gentrified by digital nomads borrowing mostly Mediterranean aesthetics. Locals seem split on the matter; the leases are bringing them more money, but lot after lot is being clear cut. The seemingly unfettered development has driven me to try to minimize our family’s impact on the overburdened local infrastructure by collecting rainwater, recycling, and composting.

After we moved in, I asked Keith what it’s like occupying his own design. It’s “a real-world case study,” he says. He can “feel it firsthand and confirm or deny different aspects of space, light, and texture.” For me it’s more sentimental. When I watch Indah on the kitchen daybeds nuzzle her roly-poly baby sister, Mira, born six weeks before we finished the house, and jump into saltwater in the sky, I savor the sense of wonder this home adds to our lives.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Ham Design Group

Landscape Design: Misterplant by Harber

Cabinetry: Wapike Concept

Tiling: Philip Lakeman Ceramic

—

Head back to the July/August 2024 issue homepage

Appears In

A Pink Pool in the Sky Buoys a Surprising Bali Home