Inside Lombok's Most Exclusive Luxury Hideaway with a Private Island Escape
Featured Property The Lombok Lodge Hospitality
Opening 2010
Designed by Vittorio Simoni
Location Lombok, Indonesia
Featured Visionary Anja Braeken & Ben Olaerts
This film was created in collaboration
In the 1990s, a Belgian couple stayed every year at the Oberoi Lombok. They loved it, but always felt something was missing. So in 2010 they bought the plot next door, brought in an Italian architect, and built nine white suites called The Lombok Lodge. Fifteen years later it has won Tripadvisor's Travelers' Choice every year, the same family still runs it, and the same Belgian couple still answers their own emails.
Anja Braeken had imagined the hotel in white from the beginning. Soft tones, linen curtains, light doing most of the work. Ben Olaerts had run a business in Belgium that the couple eventually sold together to move to Lombok. The two of them had been staying at the Oberoi next door for nearly a decade when they decided to build their own place beside it. They bought a plot of jungle and white sand at Medana Bay, on the northwest coast of the island, and brought in Italian architect Vittorio Simoni to draw it. Nine suites. Cream walls. Bleached teak. Floor to ceiling glass that opens to the sea. A 25 metre infinity pool. A pier that launches boats to the Gili Islands twenty minutes offshore. Outdoor rain showers in every room because they wanted guests to feel the breeze on their skin while they bathed. Acqua di Parma in the bathrooms because the details mattered. Breakfast and a five course dinner included with every stay because they refused to make people feel like they were being charged for every breath. The Lodge opened in 2010 with nine suites and a vision of intimate luxury. Today the wider collection employs over a hundred people and supports roughly 140 local families across Lombok and Gili Meno. Ben and Anja still live on site. They still answer their own emails. Hospitality, for them, is not a category. It is a way of being at home with people.
"We don't call them staff. We call them family. After the earthquake we rebuilt their homes ourselves. After the pandemic we kept every one of them on payroll. That is not hospitality. That is the only way we know how to run a hotel."
Ben Olaerts - Co-Founder
Vittorio Simoni understood what they meant before they finished explaining it. The Italian architect has worked with them on every property since, and the relationship runs on the kind of shorthand that comes from fifteen years of trust. They ask, he draws, the answer is already what they wanted. The Lodge is his study in restraint. Cubist white volumes set among palms, softened by linen, broken open by glass, anchored by the dark teak that runs through every room. Cream furniture catches the late afternoon light. Outdoor rain showers open to the sky so the breeze finds you while you bathe. Nothing competes with the view. Nothing distracts from the food, which is the other great obsession of the place. Chef Jiwa Raga trained at the Oberoi next door and then at Mozaic in Bali before Ben and Anja brought him home. He cooks five courses every night, blending Indonesian flavour with European technique, using vegetables grown in the Lodge's own gardens and fish landed that morning by the Medana fishermen. The sea is loud at night and quiet at dawn. By six in the morning the staff are already on the lawn, raking sand from the path, setting tables, preparing the day the way you might prepare a home for guests who matter.
