From Derelict Bunker to Modern Day Babylon: Moon Gang Ubud by YSG Studio.

Bali’s “design hotel” category has been thoroughly picked over. A decade of rattan, raw timber and a plunge pool framed just so has produced a great many properties that photograph well and mean very little. Moon Gang, which opened on a hillside above Ubud in June, is a different proposition—elevated and unmistakably of its place, which is a harder trick than it sounds.

YSG Studio is no stranger to these pages. Since 2020, Director Yasmine Ghoniem’s practice has become one of the country’s most decorated and most beloved. The signatures are well established: colour used with conviction, detailing worked to the last millimetre, art treated as structural rather than decorative. Bali tests all three.

The 512-square-metre building arrived as a problem: a private holiday residence in severe disrepair, its concrete walls damaged enough to need drying injections and external repairs before anything else could begin. Demolition is cheap and routine in Bali. YSG went the other way. “Without demolishing walls, we enhanced focal points and fluid connections to heighten immersion,” says Ghoniem—obstructive columns removed from the lounge, its central archway lowered, organic portholes carved, a tiled portal thickened so the sightline runs clean to a newly levelled pool.

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Getting anything up there was its own problem. The site sits above a paved path barely wide enough for a scooter, so every material and machine arrived on foot or by motorbike, and all joinery had to be designed for on-site assembly. The concrete skin was clad in warm cinnamon-shaded recycled earth-based render, damaged floors relaid with tessellated terracotta, and rotten boundary slats swapped for breeze blocks reoriented to read as a printed woodblock pattern. On one roof sits a new bamboo suite, stained deep charcoal indigo.

More than 15 Indonesian artisans made almost everything else, and in several cases the commission outran what the maker had done before. Pagi Motley hand-dyed the two-storey suite curtains with indigo, mango, coconut and ketapang leaf extracts, yielding marigold, matcha, aqua and deep sea blue—having never layered two or more dyes on one cloth. When Greenman Banana‘s banana paper cloud pendants needed a richer indigo, YSG brought Pagi Motley across to dye them. Weedoo Plastics supplied coloured recycled plastic to BYO Living, who had only worked in grey and white, then built new machines locally to press the thick bullnose counters in the Nongkrong Lounge. “I couldn’t give up on chunky curved surfaces,” Ghoniem says.

The art is not applied late either. Every painting and sculpture was sourced at Indonesian art fairs and local galleries, several commissioned. “Rather than replicate, we incorporated Balinese rituals and traditions in unique ways,” Ghoniem says. A black and white chequered tile relief rings the pool, nodding to Saput Poleng, the principle of balance expressed by wrapping temples and holy statues in chequered cloth. Newly blessed timber shrines hang in customised shades, and smaller resin and timber versions stand in for suite numbers. Staff leave offerings on the ledges daily. The brief was grounded in Tri Hita Karana, the Balinese philosophy of harmony with spirit, others and nature.

Music runs underneath all of it. The Nongkrong Lounge holds a curated vinyl library and a DIY DJ station, and Indonesian duo Bottlesmoker built a bio-sonic system that turns the electrical frequencies of plants into a low continuous score.

Guests reach it by chauffeured scooter, three minutes up from Ubud’s main road along the Sari Organic Walk, past rice fields, coconut palms and warungs. Then the gates: timber doors with moons carved into them, opening on an L-shaped building wrapped around a pool. From the top of the stairs it reads, Ghoniem says, as “the apparition that looks ancient”—cinnamon-hued render, curved arches, established planting—before the walk down to the patio.

It looks long settled, and half of it is. The walls were already there. Everything else was made within a few kilometres of them, much of it by people working past the edge of their own practice. A hotel that photographs well can be assembled anywhere. This one could not.

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[Images courtesy of YSG Studio. Editorial styling by Lisa Scappin. Photography by Tommaso Riva.]