15 Years In, Desa Potato Head Is Worlds From Its Beach Club Beginnings

Arriving at Desa Potato Head, the luxury beach club and hotel in Bali’s Seminyak area, you’re dropped at an arching bamboo entryway, then invited to travel through its “womb”. 

Your “birth” takes you through a winding passageway, rich with incense and dotted with marigold-topped shrines. While you might be eager to check in, or secure a spot poolside, it pays to walk slowly and take in your surroundings. 

For those of us who have been lucky enough to visit more than once, the extent of Potato Head’s 15-year evolution is staggering. The mantra here now is “Good Times, Do Good”, but when I first visited in 2013, it was one of Bali’s best beach clubs, with more of a “Good Times” slogan. Slouchy bean bags and daybeds surrounded an oceanfront infinity pool, palms swayed, bars buzzed, and top-tier DJs powered the music program.

Charging into uni holidays, we were dancing, swimming and sunbaking, while trays of frothy tropical cocktails did the rounds alongside, in a sign of very different times, decks of cigarettes. Potato Head was delivering us its promised fun –  but this fun, and the fun of hundreds of thousands of other visitors to Bali, came with a significant environmental cost that became increasingly unacceptable to owner Ronald Akili.  

Today, a noticeboard on the wall of The Womb presents this clearly: in 2017, when Akili first adopted the “do good” philosophy, 51 per cent of the waste Potato Head generated got sent to landfill: glass bottles, empty coconuts, oyster shells, soft plastic packaging, old cooking oil and kitchen scraps. Products of our partying that, I’m ashamed to admit, had not crossed my mind.

A party palace evolves

Desa Potato Head is now a critically acclaimed hotel (named 18 on The World’s 50 Best Hotels list and repeatedly recognised as a Condé Nast Traveller readers’ choice). There are 88 luxury suites; 137 studio rooms; a calm, guest-only beachfront pool, mirroring the party-ready original; a rooftop yoga deck; full-service spa; and six places to dine, including the original beach club and a breezy outdoor restaurant by the hotel pool. 

In the decade since my first visit, Potato Head has expanded from party palace to a wellness destination, luxury hotel and creative incubator. Concurrently, my understanding of ways to protect the planet has extended past composting and the sorting of recycling. I’d heard the desa was eco-conscious before I arrived, but I’m sceptical when words like “sustainability” and “pioneer” are thrown around.

But as I discovered on a recent return trip, the resort’s commitment to sustainability is profound and formidable. And many of those efforts are hidden in easily overlooked details.

My welcome drink, for example, arrives in an ice-blue tumbler designed by Potato Head collaborator and London-based furniture designer Max Lamb. It’s hand-blown, made of used glass bottles collected from across Bali then refreshed and repurposed at the on-site waste lab. The welcome drink is a dose of kunyit asam jamu, a traditional Indonesian tonic made with turmeric and ginger – grown nearby, on Potato Head’s own farm – and cut with the tangy sweetness of tamarind and the spice of black pepper, cloves and cinnamon.

My suite is inside a building composed of locally made hand-pressed bricks, traditionally crafted for Indonesian temples. More than 1.5 million of them were made for the building, designed by leading Indonesian architect Andra Matin. It’s one of several brutalist spaces on the property; this one’s anchored by an expansive courtyard intended as a community square.

In my room, I’m captivated: there are slippers made from coconut husks, and rainbow-speckled accessories made from “styroshell” – a product Potato Head developed to use oyster shells, HDPE plastic and styrofoam saved from the sea. A handmade tote – sewn from worn hotel linen dyed with marigolds – is stocked with a refillable water bottle and tins of insect repellent and sunscreen. A lightly scented candle burns, its wax made from the kitchen’s spent oil. These are tangible changes that, one by one, amount to a full-scale revolution. 

Just seven years after Akili committed to the “do good” path, the percentage of waste sent to landfill had decreased from 51 per cent to just 0.5 per cent. It has remained at that level ever since. 

Inside and out, the MO is radical innovation and style – no corners are cut in form or function. And even as systems have become more sustainable, the party hasn’t stopped. Fifteen years on, the beach club still heaves. And now there’s also Klymax, a club-club designed in collaboration with UK-born dance music trailblazer DJ Harvey, too. 

Leave no rind behind

While the resort had curbed a substantial amount of waste destined for landfill by 2024, according to the hotel, the kitchen continued to be Potato Head’s top producer of waste. Akili’s culinary team – initially led by Michelin-trained zero-waste chef and master fermenter Felix Schoener, and now culinary director Oliver Truesdale-Jutras (a leading advocate for regenerative hospitality practices) – is now tackling this head on.

Schoener was responsible for culinary sustainability and innovation, leading weekly circularity workshops with chefs of all levels, brainstorming tasty solutions using the leftovers from newly developed dishes. Truesdale now takes the reins, in kitchens where kombuchas and vinegars are fermented from scraps (ginger, lemongrass, carrot and pineapple skin), leftover bread becomes a syrupy flavour-packed garum-style sauce and lemon rinds become a zippy miso.

At the hotel’s natural wine bar, Dome, head sommelier Minyoung Ryu pairs my glass of Balinese pét-nat with crudo zinged up with lightly fermented tomatoes. Instead of hitting a compost bin, the tomatoes’ rosy skins are gathered, dried, powdered then salted – revving up the chips I order at the pool club the next day. Watermelon flesh is blitzed into cocktails and morning juices – the rinds collected and pickled then used as a bright garnish at Potato Head’s cocktail bar Sunset Park. 

Dining at vegetarian restaurant Tanaman transports me straight back to my tour of the desa’s farm, which sits on a slice of prime coastal real estate, once destined for villas, less than an hour’s drive away in Kedungu. It’s a place where trees laden with papayas stand tall next to banana palms, and where a gaggle of Indian runner ducks congregate in their pen, ready to fertilise the rice paddies and snack on bugs.

Hundreds of kilos of turmeric and ginger are grown here each year, along with herbs and marigolds for the desa. Wood-ear, shiitake and oyster mushrooms are grown on substrate made from pulped coconut shells from the beach club – they’re later skewered and roasted, then served with a punchy satay at Tanaman. Amaranth leaves are foraged from the nearby roadside, then fried till crisp in an impossibly light, spiced batter.

Breakfast congee and nasi campur, also on the menu at Tanaman, shine with a nutty Balinese heritage rice, more suited to the land than the oft-seen, quick-growing white variety. The grain’s grown on terraced plots, naturally filtering the farm’s water. The food grown here is just a blip compared to what’s needed across Desa Potato Head, with most of it going into the free staff canteen and meals for the wider community. To make up the difference, the team has provided farmers across Bali with the equipment and knowledge needed to adopt regenerative and organic practices – so far, 374 hectares of Balinese farmland has been converted.

The power of the food at Potato Head, like so much of the world Akili’s created, is a commitment to craft and the true flavours of Indonesia, with care for the planet as a non-negotiable. 

At Kaum, the hotel’s restaurant dedicated to traditional Indonesian cuisine, chef Wayan Kresna Yasa sends out dishes you might be trying for the first time. West Javanese prawn and fish dumplings. A West Sumatran-style dish of coconut-marinated beef, alive with lemongrass and chillies. Just-caught local barramundi, grilled with tamarind water and turmeric, with the hot, fruity sambals native to northern Sulawesi.

According to the hotel’s latest sustainability report, Desa Potato Head welcomed 932,253 guests in 2024. And as they danced and dined, reclined and swam, they generated 764,257 kilograms of waste. Of that, a whopping 99.5 per cent skipped landfill. But Akili’s goals are more ambitious: no-bin kitchens by 2033; 10 tonnes of waste, collected from across Bali, processed daily; and Desa Potato Head eventually becoming a zero-waste property.

This is vital for an island where, according to environmental engineering consultancy Eco-Mantra, there is an acute waste management problem that has led to rife pollution in its waterways and overflowing landfills.

A decade after my first visit, the good times still abound. But the do good’s in the details.

Book your stay at Desa Potato Head online. Or visit one of the dining spaces, all of which are open to day guests too.

The writer stayed as a guest of Desa Potato Head. 

seminyak.potatohead.co

@potatoheadbali

This story is part of Broadsheet’s special Travel Issue, presented by Commonwealth Bank and Travel Booking via the CommBank app.