The Architects of Tampah Hills

Tampah Hills sits on the hills above South Lombok, a short drive from Selong Belanak and the Kuta Mandalika coast. Its makers call it “the Seaside Society”: a low-density estate of architect-designed villas with five-star service and a sports club — championship padel, tennis, beach volleyball — where every home is framed to the ocean and the sunset.

The premise is unusual. Rather than impose one house style, Tampah Hills commissions a roster of leading studios and hands each the same difficult brief — a steep, view-rich tropical site — then lets each answer in its own language. The result is a hillside where no two villas repeat, and where the estate’s own promise holds: each villa is “uniquely designed by a leading architect.”

GFAB Architects is the studio of Gary Fell, a Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) graduate who founded the practice in 1999 after working on the Four Seasons Sayan in Ubud. GFAB is known for award-winning tropical modernism across the Asia-Pacific — Samujana on Koh Samui, Istana Naithon in Phuket, Ashok Nirvaan in India, Bask on Gili Meno. At Tampah Hills its work includes Villa 40 and Villa 55 — the latter the home now known as House of Herring, a study in the studio’s signature “grand reveal,” where the full sweep of the sea only arrives once you are inside and walking down.

Alexis Dornier trained at the Berlin University of the Arts and spent formative years in New York before settling in Ubud, where his studio now numbers more than twenty architects and designers. His register at Tampah Hills is tropical modernism met with German precision: disciplined geometry, loosened by Lombok light.

MORQ was founded in 2001 by Matteo Monteduro, Emiliano Roia and Andrea Quagliola, working between Italy and Australia and named to the AD100 list of the world’s most influential architects. Their philosophy — “architecture from the essence of place” — favours rooms that are intimate yet open, shaped by shifting natural light and the sensorial weight of raw materials.

Hadiprana is an Indonesian institution: founded in 1958 by Hendra Hadiprana, trained in the Netherlands, and grown into a 250-person firm behind some of the country’s landmark interiors and resorts. At Tampah Hills it carries that heritage into a contemporary, technically modern villa.

Caceres + Tous is the Bali studio founded in 2016 by Chilean architect Nico Caceres and Spanish interior designer Kiko Tous, pairing rigorous, functional planning with a naturalist material palette.

What ties the roster together is the land. Every plot falls toward the water, so each studio works the slope instead of flattening it — split levels, stepped pools, rooflines edited to keep the horizon. You are not choosing a room category here; you are choosing a building.

The collection we hold runs the full range. The estates and larger family villas: Villa Kastil Utara (7 bedrooms), Villa Nabu and Villa Solah (5). The four-bedroom houses: Villa Kami, Nyrenstone Residence, Villa Layang, Villa Keluarga, Villa Tibu, House of Herring, House Kala, Villa Gem and Villa Boë. The three-bedroom retreats: Villa Jati, Villa Awasi, Villa V and Villa Chibo. And the smaller pair — the two-bedroom Seaside Collective and Villa Mentari.

If you want the architecture itself to be the reason for the trip, House of Herring is the one to know — GFAB’s Villa 55, where the descent through the house withholds the view until, suddenly, it doesn’t. Villa Awasi and Villa Kami read calmer: minimalist volumes, organic materials, lush planting and a sea-and-sunset orientation from a peak position — the estate’s quieter register.

Staff, chef and the sports club are shared estate services, so a stay scales cleanly from a two-bedroom retreat to the seven-bedroom Kastil Utara without losing the five-star layer. The architecture changes; the service does not.

The brief is the same hillside. The answer never repeats.

Tell our concierge the architect or the shape of stay you want — a Gary Fell reveal, a three-bedroom on the ridge, the seven-bedroom estate — and we will match the villa and hold the dates.