Changing the Game
As any hotelier will tell you, building a hotel requires an almost masochistic appetite for long project deadlines, eye-watering expense outflow and an even longer horizon for an adjusted-for-inflation return on investment. In most cases, five years is a bare minimum, but in the case of Ronald Akili’s ambitious Desa Potato Head project, that horizon has stretched to a decade—and the Jakarta-based real-estate developer turned hotelier is still not done.
The first salvo was fired in 2010 when Akili—the son of prominent Indonesian entrepreneur and collector Rudy Akili, who also opened the Akili Museum of Art in Jakarta—launched Potato Head Beach Club in a quiet stretch of Bali’s Seminyak neighbourhood.
By any yardstick, it was a game changer: a slick mix of restaurant, music club, bar and pool, and social hangout for both locals and the greater community of hipsters that turned the tired old trope of Bali as the backdrop for surfers, yogis, spiritual shrines,
