ASAI Cafe - A Dialogue in Material
- Grady
- Sep 10, 2025
- 2 min read
Tucked into the folds of Jimbaran, ASAI Village is imagined as a quiet collective: villas, cafe, and shared spaces set within a tropical frame. Porous Tactile concrete imbued with greenery, various natural materials, and warm colours, give the interiors a grounded tactility, while open thresholds blur private retreat with communal life. The architecture recalls a lineage of tropical modernism in Bali, where material honesty and porosity to climate remain central. More than accommodation, it reads as a small study in how materials and atmosphere can shape belonging.
With only a simple sign on the main street, compressed and hidden away through a winding laneway, I was pleasantly surprised to arrive in a release - a striking yet soft cafe set among the natural greys and greens of vegetation and infrastructure. The cafe itself poses this contrast further into smaller scales, with its limited colour palette of terracotta and white, each material tuned to different tactile registers: the smoothness of terracotta brick, its sharp edges repeated in rhythm, against the roughness of white render spread across larger surfaces. The cafe’s form acts as a threshold within the village, less private than the villas yet still folded into the landscape, bridging seclusion and gathering.
Unfortunately we did not dine in to appreciate the space with consumption, but by just sitting and waiting for our takeaway order, I was able to take in the peaceful ambiance created by the balance of natural lighting illuminating the dining space and receding the ceiling into darkness. Exterior motifs were carried out into the interior, with the terracotta becoming breeze blocks for screening and acoustical insulation. Even in that short moment of waiting, the cafe suggested not just a place of service, but of lingering. In a Jimbaran streetscape often marked by excess and visual noise, ASAI’s restraint feels intentional: a reminder that atmosphere is built as much through what is held back as what is revealed.
ASAI Village reads less like a tourist development and more like a small inquiry into material and atmosphere. It shows how design, even at a modest scale, can foster belonging through the balance of retreat, community, and restraint.
