COMO Uma Canggu: a brilliant beach club with a hotel attached

I have a complicated relationship with Canggu, and it is genuinely the last place in Bali I send travellers, which makes it slightly awkward that I keep going back. The traffic is a running joke that stopped being funny years ago, and you can lose most of an afternoon covering two kilometres while a scooter with a surfboard strapped to it overtakes you for the fourth time. It isn't beautiful everywhere either. In places it looks frankly like a landfill with a smoothie bar attached. And then you sit down somewhere with no sign above the door and drink a cappuccino that would embarrass half of London, and eat a dinner you'd remember in New York, and you understand exactly why nobody who moves here ever leaves.

That's the deal with Canggu. It is a collection of excellent individual things that never add up to a whole, strung along roads that can't carry them, and it is completely brilliant regardless. A restaurant opens one week and has become a different restaurant seven weeks later. Some of the best gyms in the world are here, which is a sentence I never expected to write about a Balinese village. Nothing joins up and nobody minds.

I mention all of that because COMO Uma Canggu is the same proposition, and once you see it that way the hotel makes a great deal more sense.

Three good things at one address

COMO Shambhala Estate and COMO Uma Ubud sit near the top of my list of favourite hotels in Bali, and almost everything I love about them is absent here. That isn't a hatchet job, because this is a perfectly good hotel at a fair price and I've had happy weeks in it. But if you asked me to describe it in one line, I'd say it's a fantastic beach club with hotel rooms attached and a COMO Shambhala outpost off to the side. Three good things sharing an address, and no connective tissue between them.

You feel that most in the near-total absence of public space, because a hotel gathers itself in its shared rooms and this one hasn't really got any. The reception is tall and white and minimal in a way that photographs beautifully and invites nobody to linger. There's a small library corner and a boutique, but both work as a quiet thoroughfare on the way to somewhere else rather than as anywhere you'd choose to spend forty minutes. There is no moment in the day where the property assembles itself, and after a few stays I stopped expecting one.

The 115-metre lagoon pool ought to solve this and doesn't. On paper it should: enormous, permanently calm, never crowded. In practice nothing happens around it, it isn't especially photogenic, and across a whole stay I barely swam in it. The exception is the ground-floor residences, which open straight onto the water, and that is the single circumstance in which I'd genuinely want that pool.

The piece that works

Everything the property withholds elsewhere it delivers at the beach club, well enough that the rest almost stops mattering.

COMO Beach Club has been designed with proper corners and pockets to disappear into, around a 25-metre infinity pool looking straight out to sea. There are swing beds. The cooking holds to the standard COMO applies across the group, which mercifully has not been relaxed on the grounds that people are wearing swimming costumes. The music is good, the mood is easy without being self-conscious about it, and I spent whole days on a lounger with one eye on a beach that is permanently busy and permanently in motion, which in Canggu counts as the local wildlife.

There is one thing to know before booking, and for me it's a real issue rather than a quibble. The beach club is open to the public. In practice that means roughly 30 percent of the people around you are hotel guests and the other 70 percent are not, and that second group is a rather different crowd from the one that usually sleeps in a COMO. Guests do get privileged access to the better daybeds, which takes the edge off it, and I'd still rather have a beach club this good on a public basis than a private one half as alive. But it doesn't change the arithmetic, which is that the best part of your hotel isn't really yours.

The piece that's borrowed

The third element is the COMO Shambhala Retreat, and it behaves exactly like what it is, which is an outpost of something that lives somewhere else.

It is genuinely well equipped: seven treatment rooms, two yoga studios, two pilates studios and a proper gym. The treatment pricing is noticeably competitive by island standards, too. What it doesn't do is what COMO Shambhala does in Ubud, where the wellness idea runs through the entire property and shapes the way you spend a day. Here it's a very good spa that happens to carry the name, sitting alongside the rooms and the beach club rather than binding them together.

The location does the work the building doesn't

Which brings me to the strongest argument for staying here, and it has nothing to do with the hotel at all.

You can walk out in either direction, and in a place where a two-kilometre drive can consume an hour, that is worth more than any facility anyone could install. My habit was to take the ridge path towards Pererenan, still my favourite corner of this coast, passing La Brisa on the way, itself a fantastic beach club that deserves an afternoon of its own. In the other direction Echo Beach is a good little shopping street, and Batu Bolong and Berawa are both close enough to reach on foot before you've talked yourself into ordering a car.

A hotel that doesn't cohere matters far less when you can leave it easily, and this is the only property in Canggu where that's genuinely true.

Rooms, residences and who they suit

There are 119 keys, designed by Paola Navone and Koichiro Ikebuchi, with the Milanese and Japanese influences reasonably obvious once somebody has told you to look. The split is 52 rooms, 55 residences, and 12 three-bedroom duplex penthouses with rooftop pools and butler service, which are the genuine showpieces here.

The rooms and suites are extremely well kept: Egyptian cotton, walk-in rain showers, COMO Shambhala amenities, Nespresso machines, yoga mats as standard. One-bedroom residences run from 75 to 95 square metres and add a living room and a kitchenette with a proper oven and hob. The two-bedroom versions roughly double that again.

For a family the residences are the reason to be here rather than anywhere else in Canggu, since space and a kitchen change the shape of a week with children. For a couple a room is plenty, on the straightforward grounds that you will hardly be in it.

The staff are a different species, and I mean that kindly

The people who work here are not like the staff at other hotels on this island, and after a couple of days I stopped comparing them to anyone. It's laid back and faintly hip in a way that would grate if it weren't so plainly sincere. What comes across instead is that they're kind, that they're trying, and that they seem to be enjoying their day.

Every morning at breakfast the team took my daughter's eggs extremely seriously, because she has firm views on eggs. They absorbed those views and adjusted accordingly, every day, without ever turning it into a performance for my benefit.

Why it works anyway

Reading this back I sound more negative than I feel, because this is a good hotel in an excellent position with a beach club I'd happily spend a week inside, and I've never once regretted a stay.

What it isn't is coherent, and the longer I think about it the less that reads as a failure. You could build a perfectly integrated resort in Canggu, and it would be at odds with everything around it. This place is three excellent pieces that don't quite join up, in a town that is a hundred excellent pieces that don't quite join up, and both are better than they have any right to be.

If you want the COMO I love, go inland to Ubud and take your time about it. If you want Canggu, and every so often I do, this is where I'd sleep.