Bocas Bali Luxury Water Villas ★★★★

A Balinese Idea Anchored in a Panamanian Mangrove

Frangipani Island is mostly mangrove: nine acres of dry land against more than eighty of root and water, with a few miles of shoreline and no natural beach to speak of. That is an unpromising brief for a resort, and it is exactly what makes this one interesting. The villas were designed in the Balinese idiom, built in Indonesia by carvers who put in the order of a thousand hours per unit, then shipped across the Pacific and set on pilings over the shallows. Green quartz came from India for the steps. The result reads as a transplant, but it sits comfortably in the Bocas light, and the mangrove around it was left alone.

Why It Works

Overwater villas are rare in the Caribbean and rarer still done seriously. This is the serious version: seven villas only, adults only, each with its own plunge pool and around eleven hundred square feet of outdoor living, so the terrace rather than the bedroom is where the day happens. The clubhouse keeps the density down, with a long pool, a gym and a spa gathered away from the water. And the whole thing runs off the grid. You are fifteen minutes from a town with a working airport, and it feels like considerably further.

Why This Location

Bocas del Toro is an archipelago, and where you sleep in it decides what your days look like. Frangipani sits off Isla Colón, close enough that a boat brings you to Bocas Town in about a quarter of an hour for the restaurants, the airstrip and the ferry, far enough that none of the town's noise reaches you. The water around the island is calm, mangrove-fringed and deep at the platform's edge, which is why the snorkelling starts at the steps rather than after a crossing. Dolphin Bay, the Zapatillas cays inside Bastimentos national marine park and the surf beaches of Red Frog are all boat trips from the dock. There is no road here: arriving and leaving are both done by water.

Fast Facts

• Price: Luxury

• Vibe: overwater, adults only, quiet, Balinese

• Rooms: seven water villas, each with a private plunge pool and a large open terrace

• Best For: honeymooners, couples on a diving or snorkelling trip, travellers who want total quiet

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: the built beach, a sand deck raised on forty-foot pilings with steps that drop straight into deep water

• Dining: the Coral Café at the Colonnade clubhouse, and the Elephant House, a century-old building given over to the restaurant

• Amenities: seventy-foot pool, spa, gym, private beach area, diving and snorkelling on site, boat transfer, adults only

• Attractions: Bocas Town, Dolphin Bay, the Zapatillas cays in Bastimentos national marine park, Red Frog Beach

The Beach That Had to Be Built

The signature of the place is not a villa but a platform. With no beach on the island, the owners drove forty-foot pilings filled with concrete into the seabed and built one above the water, laid with sand and served like any beach club. Steps go down from it into roughly thirty feet of water. You swim off the edge into a mangrove channel where nurse sharks and rays work the bottom, and you are back on a lounger two minutes later. It is an odd, slightly audacious solution, and it turns the absence of a beach into the best thing on the property.

What a Thousand Hours of Teak Buys

Inside, the villas are dense with carving: doors, screens, headboards and furniture all worked in Bali before shipping. It could easily have tipped into theme-park territory. It does not, mostly because the buildings are simple in plan and generous in air, and because the sea does most of the decorating. The terraces are the real rooms here, each with a plunge pool and enough shade to sit out the middle of the day.

Off the Grid, On Purpose

The resort runs on solar power, purifies its own rainwater and treats wastewater in a system built for a mangrove setting, where a conventional one would do damage. Most of the island has been left undeveloped. None of this is shouted about on site, which is the right instinct: you notice it in the quiet, in the absence of a generator, and in the fact that the water you swim in is clear enough to see the bottom.