Renovating a Villa in Canggu? Decide the Pool First
Most Canggu renovations run in the same order. Kitchen, bathrooms, floors, paint. Then somebody says “and we should do something about the pool”, and by then half the decisions have already been made for them.
That’s backwards, and it’s expensive.
The pool is the single most constraining element on a villa plot. It sets levels. It dictates where plumbing and power have to run. It decides whether a machine can get onto the site at all, and once the new decking is down, it can’t. It needs a plant room that has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is usually where you were planning to put something nicer.
Do it last and you pay twice: once to build it, and once to undo the things that are now in the way.
The pool you’ve probably inherited
A lot of Canggu villas changing hands right now were built in the 2015–2020 boom. Which means a lot of them come with the same pool: a blue-tiled rectangle, a salt chlorinator, and a maintenance contract nobody has looked at closely.
By year five or six, three things have usually happened.
The running cost has become annoying. Salt cells last around five years and aren’t cheap to replace. Chemicals, power, a technician twice a week. It adds up to a real monthly number, and if you’re renting the villa out, it comes straight off the yield.
The tiles have started to go. Grout, waterlines, the odd cracked tile. Retiling a pool is a serious job.
It looks like everyone else’s. Which matters more than it used to. If you’re on Airbnb, the pool is the first photograph, and in Canggu right now the first photograph is a rectangle of blue tile in about nine listings out of ten.
The renovation question nobody asks: convert or keep?
Here’s the thing most people don’t know is an option. You usually don’t have to demolish the pool to change what it is.
The shell — the excavated hole, the structure, the waterproofing — is the most expensive part of any pool. If yours is sound, that’s money already spent and worth keeping. A conversion to chlorine-free reuses it.
What changes is the biology and the plumbing: a planted regeneration zone added alongside or carved out of the existing water area, reworked circulation, a pump sized for continuous gentle running, and the dosing gear removed.
It works when the shell doesn’t leak, there’s room adjacent for the regeneration zone, and you’re keeping the property a while.
It doesn’t when the structure is failing, or the plot has no spare ground. A natural pool needs roughly 30–50% more area than the swimming surface alone. On a narrow Canggu plot with the villa on one side and a boundary wall on the other, that’s often the answer, and we’ll say so.
Photographs and a few measurements are usually enough for us to tell you which one you’re in.
Why this matters more in Canggu than most places
Canggu has a water problem that’s measurable, and it’s getting worse on a schedule.
Badung’s research agency surveyed Canggu, Tibubeneng and Kerobokan Kelod in 2024. Seawater is moving inland through the groundwater at 35 to 56 metres a year. In Kerobokan Kelod the groundwater already carries up to 20,000 mg/L of dissolved solids (BRIDA Badung, 2024).
Your conventional pool participates in this. It’s filled from the aquifer, topped up from it all dry season, drained and refilled periodically, and if it’s a salt pool it’s pushing its own 3,000–5,000 ppm back into the ground on every backwash.
A natural pool is never drained and discharges nothing. On this stretch of coast that stops being an environmental gesture and becomes the practical argument — because the bore water is getting worse, and the pool that doesn’t depend on it is the pool that still works in ten years.
The ground here is also generally good for aquifer recharge pits, which is not true everywhere on the island. If you’re already digging for a renovation, that’s the cheapest time to put one in.
Sequence it like this
1. Decide the pool before anything structural. Convert, rebuild, or leave alone. Everything downstream depends on this.
2. Sort access next. Where does a machine get in, and what has to stay clear until it’s out? This is the constraint that catches people. Decking, walls and mature planting all go in after, not before.
3. Then plant room and services. Pumps need somewhere to live, and they make noise. Deciding this late is how equipment ends up in the one place you didn’t want it.
4. Then levels and drainage. Pool overflow, deck falls, where wet season runoff actually goes.
5. Then everything else. Decking, landscaping, finishes, furniture.
If you’re working with an architect or a builder already, this is worth raising with them early. We’re happy to talk to them directly — it’s usually a faster conversation than going through the owner.
What Canggu actually rewards
One thing worth designing for, since you’re renovating anyway.
Canggu faces west. For an hour before dusk, a dark-bottomed pool on a west-facing plot stops reading as water and starts reading as a mirror — the entire sky lands in it. Most pools here are pale blue and throw that light away.
If the villa is a rental, that hour is your listing photo, and almost nobody in your street has it. It costs nothing extra to get right at the design stage and it’s essentially impossible to retrofit once the interior finish is on.
There’s more on how a Canggu plot behaves — orientation, ground, drainage — on our Canggu area page.
Where to start
A free 30-minute video call. Send photographs of the existing pool beforehand if you have them; they tell us most of what we need to know about whether conversion is on the table.
We’ll talk through your site, your needs and your vision. If it looks like a fit, we come and walk the site, then produce a sketch or concept and a cost estimate.
And if a natural pool doesn’t suit the plot, we’ll tell you on the call. Better to know before the renovation schedule is set than after.