Australian-born landscape designer and architect Made Wijaya (ne Michael White), resident on Bali since 1973, takes us on a private, guided color photo tour of twenty-four exquisite dream dwellings of the rich and famous. This lush pictorial essay displays the diversity, romance, and mystery of Balinese architecture: gorgeous bamboo and coconut wood barn houses, traditional rice storage bungalows, sumptuous estate grounds, water buffalo hide canopies, extravagant plunge pools, modern beachfront compounds hidden away in pandanus thickets, and royal water palaces. The reader's memory fills in the exotic, background atmosphere of dimly lit, shadowy courtyards; languid open-air pavilions; lava stone shrine silhouettes; the night time tinkle of village gamelan music through the thick foliage--and the sweet Asian smell of heat, flowers, and fire.The concept of "home" in Bali is the "buana alit," a "small world," or microcosm of the greater world outside: lavish photo after photo transports us inside houses set like precious jewels in sculpted rice fields, rural villages, and isolated mountain eyries. This is where lucky strangers in paradise (painters, anthropologists, celebrities, rock stars, socialites, film makers, architects) have selectively carved out their own individual piece of an island paradise. Wijaya reminds us that the foreigners who came to Bali and fell in love with it designed these magnificent retreats as an extension of and as "an homage to that love." Photographer Ginanneschi uses a crisp, telling juxtaposition of interspliced color and black and white imagery to depict the contrasting spheres of east and west, and of native-born Balinese and their adopted, reborn-as-Balinese neighbors. The exceptional residences of the expatriates are recorded in brilliant splashy color while the everyday lives of the local people are shot in hazy, almost sepia-tone black and white. These muted snapshots capture the busy communal essence of Balinese life: readers are left to marvel at the sea of faces, families, and communities, and the elaborate pageantry of village markets, rituals, and religious ceremonies. For all their splendor and opulence, the glossy Architectural Digest showplaces appear deserted and surreal--compellingly isolated from the vibrant, teeming life swirling all around them. At Home in Bali has great appeal for devotees of fine homes and gardens and architecture buffs (note the Javanese, South Indian, Chinese, Dutch, and Portuguese styles and influences). Tourists to Bali will treasure this book as a special keepsake of the natural (and manmade) beauty they have savored during their eye-opening sojourn to the center of the archipelago.