Nihi Sumba

Claude and Petra Graves reached the beach of Nihiwatu in the early 1980s after walking the coast of Sumba with surfboards, looking for a wave. They found one: a long left-hander breaking off the headland, later named Occy's Left after the Australian surfer Mark Occhilupo. They bought land from the villages, built bungalows and opened Nihiwatu as a surf camp in 1988. That camp, on the south-west coast of the island, 400 kilometres east of Bali, became Nihi Sumba.

History

Sumba is one of the drier, poorer islands of eastern Indonesia, with a culture of megalithic tombs, ikat weaving and the Pasola horseback festival that long predates its Christian present. The Graves ran Nihiwatu for more than two decades, and in 2001 Claude Graves and Sean Downs set up the Sumba Foundation to fund clinics, wells and schools in the villages around the resort; malaria cases in the area fell sharply as a result.

In 2012 the American entrepreneur Chris Burch, co-founder of the fashion house Tory Burch, bought the resort together with the South African hotelier James McBride, who had run the Carlyle in New York. They rebuilt it over the following years, kept the wave and the foundation, and reopened it in 2015; the name changed to Nihi Sumba in 2017. In 2016 Travel + Leisure readers voted it the best hotel in the world, and they did so again in 2017, the first time any property had taken the top place twice in a row.

Architecture and design

The villas are built from local timber, stone and alang-alang thatch, in the steep-roofed shape of Sumbanese houses, scattered along the beach and up the hillside above the bay. Each has a private pool and an open-air bale, and the larger ones run to several bedrooms around a shared deck. The resort covers a long stretch of coastline and forest, and the design keeps the buildings low so that the beach and the headland dominate.

Rooms and suites

There are 27 villas. One-bedroom houses stand at the water's edge; multi-bedroom estates sit higher on the hill. Raja Mendaka, Chris Burch's own house, is let as a whole when he is not in residence. Villas on the beach front open directly onto the sand; those on the hill look over the break.

Dining

Meals are served at Ombak, the restaurant above the beach, with fish from the local boats, vegetables from the resort's own gardens and bread from its bakery. Nio Beach Club by the pool does lunch. Dinners move around the estate: a boma under the stars, a long table in the gardens, a picnic at the waterfall after a trek.

Wellness

The Spa Safari is the signature: guests walk or ride across the hills to Nihioka, a clifftop above a second beach, and spend the day there with treatments in open bales, a plunge pool and lunch, before being driven back. The main spa on the estate offers Indonesian massage and treatments in pavilions near the beach. Horses are stabled on site and ridden along the sand and into the sea; there is a yoga pavilion, and the wave is limited to ten surfers a day.

Weddings and events

Weddings are held on the beach and in the gardens, with the resort taken over as a whole for the larger ones. Groups use the estate's pavilions and dining spaces rather than conventional meeting rooms; there is no conference centre.

Location

Nihi Sumba lies on the south-west coast of Sumba, in the province of East Nusa Tenggara. Guests fly from Bali to Tambolaka airport, about 50 minutes, and are driven roughly 90 minutes to the resort. The nearest town of any size is Waikabubak. The distance from Bali is why the place feels as far away as it does, and that distance is the point of a luxury resort on Sumba.