The matter of the island

The rain tree — with a crown so wide it is often broader than the tree is tall, spanning up to thirty metres. Its leaves fold up at night and before rain, as if the tree itself were falling asleep.

Interlocked, crossing fibres keep suar from cracking in dry climates — which is why carvers and importers beyond the tropics love it. Its wavy grain, from honey to dark chocolate, never repeats itself in any two boards.

The wood once used for the decks of ocean-going ships — the gold standard wherever resistance to water and salt mattered. Natural oils (tectoquinones) act as a built-in impregnation, while silica protects against cracking through wet–dry cycles.

The finest teak grows on Java, on plantations established by the Dutch in the early nineteenth century and managed today by the state forestry enterprise Perhutani. A classic piece of furniture comes from a tree that grew for sixty to eighty years.

A climbing palm that can reach a hundred metres in the jungle. Cut, steamed and bent by hand, it turns into lamps, mirrors and armchairs.

Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of rattan — around eighty percent of global supply, with more than three hundred species growing mainly on Kalimantan and Sulawesi. The living weave lets light through like foliage, which is why rattan shades cast a shadow that turns a room into a garden at dusk.

On the rivers and lakes of Java it is an invasive weed — spreading so fast it chokes the fisheries and starves the water of oxygen. And yet from this nuisance a material is born: harvesting the stems clears the lake at the same time.

Dried in the sun and flattened, the stems are twisted into a thick, soft braid. Baskets of eceng gondok smell of hay and sunshine — the most “homely” of all weaves: warmer than wicker, more durable than it looks. An object that cleans the water before it reaches your home.

Sari Bali washbasins begin life as boulders in the beds of Balinese rivers. Polished for weeks, they keep the coolness and weight of the element.

Bali also has its own temple stone — paras, a soft volcanic tuff from which statues of the gods have been carved for centuries. Onyx (the Indonesian kind is quarried in Tulungagung on Java, among other places) is a translucent stone that, lit from within, glows like the moon. Hence the name of our washbasin: Bulan.

Soft when freshly quarried, it hardens with every passing year — the craftsmen say the stone “falls asleep” in the shape it has been given.

Sandstone figures carry a cool, mineral calm. Rain does them no harm; it only adds further layers of patina.

A pattern drawn on fabric with hot wax that blocks the dye — hence the name, derived from the Javanese for “writing in dots”. Batik tulis is drawn by hand with a canting tool over weeks; batik cap is stamped with a copper seal. UNESCO inscribed Indonesian batik on its heritage list in 2009.

You can tell true batik by a pattern equally crisp on both sides of the fabric. A print shows on one side only. And if you are looking for weaving rarer still, read about geringsing — Indonesia’s only double-woven cloth.

A coconut shell, polished to the sheen of dark glass, becomes a bowl for the morning. Nothing goes to waste — an island principle, not a fashion.

Sandalwood (cendana in Balinese) is the scent of the temples: warm, creamy, patient. Alongside it, Balinese incense holds gaharu — the dark, fragrant resin a wounded agarwood tree produces to defend itself against a fungus. The world knows it as oud.