W Bali, Seminyak: the hotel I visited for fourteen years before I ever slept there

The first time I came to Bali I spent two weeks at The Oberoi and fell properly in love with the island. Somewhere around day four we worked out that the cure for too much serenity was a ten-minute walk up the beach to the W. We went most evenings after that, for the music and the open-air bar and that particular hum a room gets when everyone in it is pleased to be there, and then we walked back to the quiet. Two speeds, twenty minutes apart. For fourteen years that was my entire relationship with this hotel, and I never once considered staying in it.

The brunch that ruined buffets for me

We also did the Sunday brunch three weeks running, which is where the trouble started. Until then I had filed buffets under cheap and efficient ways to eat a great deal, having never seen a luxurious one. Then I walked into the W and watched oysters and lobster being stacked up as though none of it counted, and my jaw genuinely dropped. I'm used to that sort of thing now, fourteen years and a lot of hotels later, but you never forget the first one and this was mine. It still runs, incidentally, and it's still the reason a lot of people come through the gate on a Sunday with no intention of staying the night.

Hip, without the yoghurt

What kept me coming back long after the novelty wore off is harder to name, and I think it comes down to the fact that this hotel is playful without being exhausting. A great many fashionable places in Bali are exhaustingly fashionable, with an unspoken requirement that you enjoy fermented yoghurt and avocado toast and being photographed in the vicinity of both, and the W somehow never crosses that line. It's modern. It's silly in places. It knows exactly what it is. Whoever has been guarding the border between fun and insufferable here has been doing it well for a decade and a half, which in Seminyak counts as a genuine achievement.

The pricing quirk that decides your weekend

So after all those years of eating and drinking here, I finally booked a weekend, mostly out of curiosity about whether sleeping here was a different proposition. It turns out it is, with one quirk you should know before you book anything. The base rooms are relatively expensive at somewhere between 300 and 350 euros, while a one-bedroom villa with its own pool sits at around 500. That villa runs to 225 square metres in a lush and properly considered garden. The gap between those two prices is a great deal smaller than the gap between the two experiences, so if you can stretch to it, stretch. There's a second reason too, which is that the villas are quiet in a way the rest of the property emphatically isn't. You hear birds. You do not hear the pool. I know someone who booked a room near the party end and spent an entire weekend slowly losing his mind, so this is not a theoretical warning.

Why the villas feel more expensive than the brand

The villas also surprised me on quality, and I think there's a reason for that. This was one of the first W hotels anywhere, opened in 2011 as the brand's debut in Indonesia, and it has the unmistakable feel of a project where the designers were handed a real budget and told to enjoy themselves. Later Ws don't feel like this at all. Here the materials are better, the detailing heavier, and the villa reads as expensive rather than merely styled. That's not a sentence I expected to write about a W.

The walk now happens inside the hotel

What I liked most about staying rather than visiting is that the walk I used to make from the Oberoi now happens inside the property. A full day at the pool is intense, the precise opposite of serene and entirely by design. But with my own villa and pool to disappear into, the days found their own pattern: lounging at one of the bars, watching people for a while, a swim, then back through the garden to the birds. The hum and the quiet, twenty minutes apart, without ever leaving the grounds.

Two things I laughed about

The buggy rides between the two deserve their own paragraph. The path through the villa gardens is cobbled, the cobbles are uneven, and the staff take them at a speed I can only describe as committed. I am two metres tall with a Burgundian build, and I found myself holding on with some conviction, half expecting to be deposited into a hedge. The staff thought this was extremely funny. So did I. My wife and I also spent an evening testing the Bose system in the villa at maximum volume, on the grounds that staff had told us the villas were absurdly well insulated and we wanted to see for ourselves. They were right, and writing it down brings the whole silly feeling back.

Where to eat

The eating is a real part of why this place works, and the two that impressed me most were Starfish Bloo and Fire. Starfish Bloo is the beachfront one and the reason to book anything at all, running Mediterranean with an Asian accent these days around seafood and seasonal produce, in a room built so thoroughly on an ocean theme that you end up eating inside an oversized fish basket with aquamarine columns holding the roof up. It's also still where the Sunday brunch happens, though the format has evolved into a series with a different guest kitchen taking over for a single day each month, so the thing I ate three Sundays running has become a rotating one.

By evening the whole room changes register. The aquamarine columns catch the light, the beach beyond turns to silhouette, and the same tables that felt playful at lunch start to feel like the reason to book a table in the first place.

Fire is the grill, and the one I'd send a carnivore to: a dramatic open kitchen, twelve cuts brought to the table, a meat sommelier to talk you through them. The interior takes its cue from the Kecak dance, which sounds like a stretch right up until you're sitting in it. WooBar is the three-storey beach bar where the sunset happens and the DJs play, and where I spent a good part of fourteen years before I ever saw one of the bedrooms.

Breakfast, twice over

Breakfast is served at both Fire and Starfish Bloo and they aren't the same, so you can pick a different one each morning, and both are excellent in the way that matters: enormous buffets alongside à la carte options interesting enough that you'd order them anywhere. I still think about the babi guling omelette. It also buzzes from the moment you sit down, because there is no gentle easing into the day at the W and the tone gets set with the coffee.

Honest about the service

I'd be less than honest if I didn't say the service is good on some days and less good on others. This is a busy hotel, and the staff are visibly under pressure at peak times. What I'd say in their favour: they keep trying anyway. Even when it's clearly hectic, people here make an effort to give you actual attention rather than processing you, which counts for more with me than flawless timing does.

What keeps me coming back

The W isn't the best hotel I've stayed in on this island and it has never pretended otherwise. But I've had more fun here than at a good many places that take themselves extremely seriously, and after fourteen years I still think it's one of the most original hotels in Bali. It manages not to take itself seriously while taking luxury very seriously indeed, which is considerably harder than it looks.

You feel that before you've even arrived. There's a long driveway in under the trees, and at the end of it the security team greet you with real warmth. Most hotels put a barrier there. This one puts the tone.