Potato Head departure

From the team that turned the Bali beach club scene on its head with Potato Head Beach Club in 2009, the hospitality group PTT Family together with Andra Matin (architect), Takenouchi Webb (interiors) and Larch Studios (landscape) is doing it again. April saw the debut of Seminyak’s highly anticipated 58-room all-suite boutique hotel, Katamama.

In direct contrast to the curvilinear colisseum-like beach club that sits proudly between the ocean and the hotel, Katamama is distinctly rectilinear with not a single arc or frivolous curve in sight. The language is very much horizontal; straightaway it conveys a sense of rest and respite, like yin & yang, it’s the perfect balance to the vivacious party scene next door.

There is something reassuring about this vernacular building; there are no lofty volumes or are there any attention-seeking cues or shameless grandeur, spaces resemble the proportions of a private home, it’s all very human-scale, livable and comfortable – exactly as the architect intended.

It is purposeful. It is exacting. Although not in the sense that it is rigidly polished, perfect or flawless. Constructed from no less than a 1.5 million bricks that will continue to patina and oxidize, and with each individual piece handcrafted by local artisan brick makers, faultless is something it never set out to be. But it is exacting in that the entire project is a bespoke creation by local craftsmen, from artists, textile dyers and weavers, carpenters, stonemasons, joiners, and ceramicists. Along with custom designed furnishings and other handpicked objet d’art, mid-century enthusiasts will no doubt appreciate the collection of authentic lamps and chairs by Poulsen, Le Corbusier, Jacobsen and Wegner throughout the suites.