Inside a 2,000m2 Indian-Inspired Villa in Bali: 3 Interior Design Lessons from Villa Nenek Coco

The rain came in through the dining room. There are no windows in that part of the house. The family built it that way on purpose.

The villa is over 2,000 square metres. A Spanish family of nine lives here in Canggu, Bali. The wife, Mersuka Dopazo, is an artist. She designed the space with her husband and architect Felipe (Sukyf Architects) over years of travel to India, Morocco, and Southeast Asia. The result is a home shaped by all of it, at the same time.

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The Wall That Was Not Built

The main living and dining areas have no exterior wall. The space is fully open to the landscape. Rain enters. Wind enters. There is no glass between the room and the rice fields.

Most interiors treat the view as something to frame. This home treats it as something to be inside. The decision handles ventilation, sound, and visual connection to the surrounding rice fields simultaneously. One design move with multiple functions.

What to Learn: The difference between framing a view and including a view is fundamental. An open wall is not an absence. It is a decision. In tropical climates where cross-ventilation is a priority, removing the barrier between interior and exterior does two jobs at once. Consider what each barrier in a room is protecting against, and whether that protection is necessary.

Bigger Picture: When you remove the barrier between interior and exterior, you accept the landscape as a participant in the room. The room changes with weather, light, and season. That is the intention. Interior design often seeks to control environment. This house chose to include it instead.

A Temple in Jaipur Supplied the Color

The terracotta red covering every structural surface in this villa traces back to one building: a specific temple in Jaipur, India. Not a color family, not a trend reference, not a mood board. One building. The color was then applied to every wall, beam, and column in the villa without adjustment.

Bold color choices often fail because they are applied tentatively and inconsistently. Here, the commitment was total. What makes the color hold is the contrast it sits against: the deep green of the rice fields, the off-white of raw marble, the dark grain of old Indian wood. A bold color does not need company if it has contrast.

What to Learn: A single color reference is more powerful than a color family or a mood board. When you commit to a bold structural color fully, applying it everywhere without adjustment, visual coherence follows. What the color sits against matters as much as the color itself. Identify the contrast first, then decide on the bold choice.

Bigger Picture: Interior design often treats bold color as a risk. This villa demonstrates that the risk is rarely the color itself. The risk is the lack of commitment to it. When a single color is applied to every structural surface, with sufficient contrast from the materials and landscape around it, it becomes a foundation. It stops being a statement and starts being a logic.

Want to go deeper in color palettes? Check out our Curated Color Palettes

The Ceiling as a Spatial Tool

The main living room has very high ceilings. In a space this large, that creates scale at the cost of warmth. To address this without structural intervention, the artist collected dozens of handwoven baskets and hung them at varying heights across the ceiling.

The installation created a visual floor about two metres above the furniture. The perception of the ceiling height changed. The architecture did not. The baskets are also a collected artwork. The ceiling stopped being a blank plane and became the most interesting surface in the room.

What to Learn: The ceiling is a fifth wall. It deserves the same design attention as any other surface. Suspended elements at varying heights reduce perceived vertical distance and create warmth that a uniform pendant installation cannot. A collected installation is more effective than a designed one because the irregularity is part of the result.

Bigger Picture: Scale without intimacy is one of the most common problems in large interior spaces. The solution does not have to be structural. Objects, textiles, and collected things can change the spatial reading of a room without touching the architecture. This basket ceiling is one of the clearest examples of that principle.

Villa Nenek Coco was finished one to two years ago. It reads as if it has been here for decades. The collection of furniture, art, and objects was built over years of travel. The design logic is clear from every room. That combination, time, intention, and a specific vision, is what produces a home worth studying.

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