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The rounded curves of John Pettigrew’s studio jut out into the Was River valley south of Ubud in Bali, from below appearing to blend into the hillside and palm trees like a thatched-roof hut or tree house.

It is a stunning setting, and in the late afternoon — with the sun going down behind the hill and house — the balcony, veranda and garden are cool havens of tropical sweetness.

This is the sort of place people envision when they say they want to live in Bali, but the studio had humble beginnings. Pettigrew points across the garden to what he calls the “bachelor pad,” which he, his wife, Novi, and their 7-year-old daughter still use as their main living quarters.

“When I built [that] house, I ran out of money, and it was coming into the rainy season, and I had no roof,” he says. “I was flat broke. A friend of mine lent me some money to put the roof on, and it was literally a mattress on the floor. I had no electricity for the first five years, and no running water. Every morning I’d come out with my buckets to the well, pull up water and have my mandi [bath] right down below us here.”

That was in 1991, three years after Pettigrew first traveled to Bali and “fell in love” with the island.

“It was simple in those days. The idea was to spend three or four months of the year here, and continue working back in Europe,” he says.

Pettigrew, from Ireland, is a landscape designer who studied at the National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin outside of Dublin and worked in his home country and Europe for years before making the move to Bali.

“But in Europe, in the wintertime, people don’t really think about their gardens, so I used to head off traveling every year,” he says. “I wasn’t really thinking of working here at all.”

This was before the building boom of hotels and villas in Bali that started in the mid-1990s and has never really stopped.

Pettigrew started doing small jobs on the island when a former traveling friend — who had come to Bali with him in 1988 — asked him to work on a gallery. And, in 1995, Pettigrew was hired to plan the grounds of Bali’s Reptile Park.

“The second job was a house up in Campuan. I was doing villas, gardens, then after the Reptile Park, I got involved in the hotels — Begawan Giri [now Como Shambhala], the Four Seasons, Bulgari.”

Pettigrew has also done landscape designs for the Bali Bird Park, Ubud’s Botanic Garden and the villas for such prominent expatriate Ubudians as John Hardy and Chris Gentry.

“These days it’s more luxury houses and some smaller, boutique resorts as well,” says Pettigrew, who now has three architects working for the company, Design in Nature, that he and his wife run from his studio in the village of Singakerta.

“A big part of our work is outside [Bali] now, mainly India and China. Probably about 40 percent in India, 30 percent in China and the rest here,” he says.

So, who does an Ubud-based landscape designer who has worked on some of Asia’s best-known five-star hotels call when he wants to add a studio-cum-living and entertainment space to his house?

Naturally he calls on a friend, Wolfgang Widmoser, who happens to be a well-known Austrian artist also based in Ubud.

The original house, the one Pettigrew calls the “bachelor pad,” is based on a picture of a Spanish house that he had seen in a magazine.

“When we came around to building [the studio in 2007], I said to Wolfgang, the condition is that the design of this house and the design of that house, that they match. In fact, they don’t match at all, and I’m not worried about that actually. I love this space,” he says.

The original design for the studio called for a roof of reinforced concrete, like feral cement, and then a tented roof was considered, but that turned out to be too expensive and would have had to be imported from Thailand.

“I’m really glad we chose alang-alang , because I didn’t want something really modern, and I think the [grass roof] gives kind of a traditional feel to it,” Pettigrew says.

Then he points out the steel beams that support the walls and the roof, something that one doesn’t really notice because of the naturalness of the rest of the structure.

The hardest part of working with steel was constructing the sweeping curves at each end of the studio. They had to be made of short steel sections of about 10 centimeters in width, welded together and then sanded down.

“That curve is all tiny little sections welded together to get that whole, big curved span. It was a lot of work,” he says.

To go with this marriage of steel, glass and alang-alang — the modern and the traditional — Pettigrew and his wife went for a “slightly primitive” look for the interior. Haunting portraits of tribal warriors grace the walls, and spears, drums and masks are displayed on shelves and stands. The bar stools and an ottoman are covered with animal skins.

The other special feature of the studio and the living area is the skylight that runs the length of the building. “The theory is that the hot air rises and goes out through a 27-centimeter [gap between] the glass and the alang-alang , so it’s always pretty cool in here,” Pettigrew says.

And with the deck up at treetop level, it’s also a good place for bird watching. On the lower level, where Pettigrew used to draw up water for his mandi in the early days, there is a guest bedroom that looks out onto the garden and the river valley.

For Pettigrew, one of the best times of the day is the early morning, because, as a practicing Buddhist, he is up chanting in the living area of the upper floor, as the sun comes up over the river valley and in through the glass doors leading to the deck.

Nodding toward the deck, he says: “And under a full moon, that’s fabulous. Sitting out there having a glass of wine is probably the most magical thing.”