The Englishman of the Bukit.

There is a particular trick to wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and ankle-length linen trousers in thirty degrees of Indian Ocean humidity, and Josh Forrow has it. The shirt is loose at the cuff. The trousers sit just above the ankle bone. The feet, when you find him, are always bare. The effect, encountered on a clifftop somewhere south of the Uluwatu temple, is of an Englishman who has misplaced his shoes on the way to the cricket and decided not to bother. Which is approximately, although not exactly, what happened.

He has lived on the Bukit Peninsula for more than a decade. His friends, the old ones from the Bingin years, still call him Bobba. His business cards, when he hands them out — which is rarely — read Josh Forrow. The hospitality group he has built, the one with venues stretching from the cliffs above Padang Padang to the sand at Bingin, trades as Ours. Each of those is a name he answers to, in a slightly different register, in a slightly different room.

Walk into Ulu Cliffhouse on a Friday afternoon and you will, if you stay long enough, see all three. The English gentleman receiving guests on the upper deck. Bobba pulling a chair around the rock bar for an old friend. Forrow checking the pass and signing a docket on his way through the kitchen. The same person, three modes, all of them his own.

I. The arrival

He came to Bali in 2014, on the recommendation of friends already settled in Bingin — the surf enclave that sits a few cliffs north of the Uluwatu temple and operates, as it has always operated, on its own time. He was thirty-something, English, with a hospitality background and an appetite for the kind of work that does not yield to spreadsheets. The Bukit Peninsula in 2014 was still recognisably the place the early Australians had described in their reverent surf shorthand. A few warungs. A few losmen. The road in from Kuta long and bad. The Single Fin was the only proper bar on the cliffs. The temple monkeys still outnumbered the tourists.

What he did next is now part of the hospitality history of the headland. With The Mandala Group, Forrow led the conversion of a derelict recording studio at the edge of the Padang Padang cliffs into Ulu Cliffhouse — a fifty-thousand-square-foot day-into-night venue designed by Shed of London and Bali's Design Assembly. The brief was unfashionable at the time. Not a hotel. Not a beach club. Not a restaurant. The assembly of all three under a single roof, in a place that did not yet have a name for it.

It took the better part of three years to build and several more to grow into what it is now.

II. The room

Tatler called Ulu Cliffhouse one of the best private clubs in the world. CNN's travel desk put it on its list of the most beautiful restaurants. The Peruvian chef Diego Muñoz, who had taken Astrid & Gastón into the World's Fifty Best, came on as opening culinary lead. The architectural press wrote about the geometric pool, the cantilevered terraces, and the rock bar carved into the cliff face below. The travel press wrote about the sunsets. The dance press, when it arrived, wrote about the DJs.

Bestival flew in for two days in 2017. Carl Cox followed. Fatboy Slim followed. Peggy Gou followed. The relationships, in each case, were friendship-first. The booking followed the friendship. Carl Cox did not fly to Bali to be paid a fee. He flew to Bali to see Bobba.

The hospitality group around Ulu Cliffhouse has, in the years since, become genuinely substantial. It now operates under the Ours umbrella and includes The Beach House by Ours at Bingin, AMA by Ours, Ours Bali, Tabu, Ours Spa, Ours Home, GDAS, Papa's Deli and the Backyard at Bingin. Each one was opened with a different collaborator, a different chef, a different design language. Forrow's signature is not aesthetic. It is curatorial. He picks the room, he picks the team, he picks the chef. The venue arrives from inside out.

III. The wedding

In April of 2025 he married Tarah Rodgers at Ulu Cliffhouse. Rodgers — a New York-based model represented by IMG in Australia, VNY in New York, Storm in Los Angeles, and agencies in Milan, Madrid and Munich — is the kind of person who appears in a Vogue Italia archive and on a Marvel Netflix series in the same year. She trained as a yoga teacher. She co-founded a swimwear label called Tigra. She has spent enough time on the Bukit to be recognised by name at half the warungs in Bingin.

The ceremony ran four hours on a Friday afternoon. The celebration continued, the way these things do, well into the following week. The DJ booth was manned by people whose names would mean something to anyone holding a Mixmag subscription. The bride's New York people met the groom's Bingin people on the upper deck. The night ended where it usually ends in Uluwatu — at the rock bar, with the waves under everyone's feet, and the temple lights on the cliff above already a long way behind.

IV. The long lunch

The Bukit Peninsula's hospitality identity has shifted around him over the past three years. The party-first decade that Single Fin pioneered, that Omnia translated into a Las Vegas register, and that Savaya stretched into the small hours, is yielding to something more considered. Long lunches. Wine lists rather than bottle service. Ingredient-led kitchens. Forrow's group has read this room early and turned the Cliffhouse itself toward it.

The new direction at Ulu — an open-fire Mediterranean kitchen, a new rooftop deck built so that sunset is available three hundred and sixty-five days a year regardless of the southwest monsoon, a wholesale repositioning toward serious food and considered drinking — is the most visible expression of where the Bukit is going next. The music has not disappeared. It has been moved to its proper place. Under the food rather than over it.

V. The Englishman

Forrow is in the building every day, the way he has been in the building every day for twelve years. The cooks know him. The bar staff know him. The cleaners know him by name and ask after his wife. He answers in the soft English voice that, at this point, carries no contradiction at all with the bare feet, the linen trousers, and the loose cuff. The English gentleman became the Englishman of the Bukit. The boy from Bingin became the man on the cliff. The room kept growing around him.

There is a lot more to do. He is, on every measure, just getting started.

The shirt is loose at the cuff. The feet are bare. The cliff is still there, and so is the sunset, and so is the long lunch on the upper deck where the breeze comes up off the water in the late afternoon and the conversation slows down the way conversation slows down when the day has been long enough.

This is the room he made. He is still in it.