Desa Potato Head, Bali

These days, if your hotel isn’t sustainable, it ain’t worth knicker elastic. Oh and while we have you, if your hotel is just a common-or-garden, well, hotel, the kids are gonna get restless. Which is where Desa Potato Head comes in. If you’ve been to Bali – specifically, Seminyak, the pulsating heart of the (in)famous Indonesian pleasure island – you’ll know Potato Head, the lifestyle hub where revellers in all the right sunglasses party till the sun goes down (and often right back up again) at their Beach Club, while it’s heads-down at Katamama, their outrageously stylish hotel. But that was just for starters. Part of a decade plan to create ‘a visionary utopia’, these next few months sees the unveiling of the final stages of Desa (‘village’ in Indonesian) Potato Head’s masterplan ‘to create an entirely new (hospitality) model’, according to founder Ronald Akili. And it’s all as stunning as it is ambitious. Centre of it all is an OMA-designed (like, really important architects!) masterpiece of sustainability, a dazzling monolith-by-thebeach containing 168 Potato Head Studios (with furniture made from recycled plastic materials by British designers Max Lamb and Faye Toogood), plantbased restaurant Tanaman, a recording studio, a high-fidelity (subterranean!) disco designed in partnership with DJ Harvey, plus a sexy pool right there by the beach. And that’s before we get to their ever-expanding programming; workouts on the sand developed by Ocho System, sound healing, eco workshops... We’ve seen the future, and it’s Desa Potato Head.

ptthead.com