Bale & Bone
What a home owes its surroundings

The neighbours include a critically endangered bird

If you intend to grow old somewhere, the health of that place stops being an abstraction. Bali's own starling, Leucopsar rothschildi, was down to six wild birds in 2001. A 2021 survey counted around 420 in Bali Barat National Park and roughly a hundred more on Nusa Penida.

What turned that around was not a ministry. It was awig-awig, the customary village law, applied by communities who decided the bird was theirs to protect. One assessment credits those rules with roughly a twelvefold improvement in anti-poaching compliance over formal criminal law. The banjar you move into is a real institution with real authority, and it long predates your land certificate.

The practical version: build so the forest corridor survives, keep night lighting off nesting beaches where turtles come ashore, put in soak wells instead of sealing the plot, and size the pool to what the aquifer can actually give. Houses that ignore this age badly and make bad neighbours.

What we will not take on

  • Green-zone land presented as a rezoning formality.
  • Cliff-edge plots where spoil and drainage end up in a reef.
  • Builds sized to a water supply that is already failing in the dry season.
  • Anything that needs a protected species, a forest corridor or a neighbour's well to quietly go away first.
  • Projects on productive agricultural land, which the province banned from commercial conversion in September 2025.

What we actually are

An independent research desk on the Bali property market, and a form. There is no portfolio on this site, no track record and no team page, because inventing those is how this industry earns its reputation. What you get is sourced market knowledge, clearly marked estimates, and a referral to people who are licensed to sign things: a notary (PPAT), an independent lawyer, a certified architect.