By HTE Founder, Erin Hughes.
It seems slightly crazy that this was my first time staying at Komune.
My husband is a surfer and has been coming to Keramas for years to surf its famous right-hand reef break. I knew Komune. I’d heard about it. I knew exactly where it sat.
But I had never actually stayed there.
Within hours of arriving, I was wondering why I had left it so long.
There is something about the scale of Komune that you don’t quite appreciate until you are inside it. The grounds are spacious and green, the pace is calm and there is an immediate sense that you have stepped away from the busier version of Bali.
My first thought was: health retreat meets beautiful resort.
Komune sits directly on Keramas Beach on Bali’s east coast, looking over the world-famous surf break that has helped shape its identity from the beginning. Today, the resort has grown well beyond surfing. Alongside the Beach Club and accommodation are a Health Hub, Reformer Pilates studio, fitness facilities, yoga, a Recovery Centre, spa, restaurants, family facilities, kids club and skate park.
What I loved most was that none of it felt like you had signed up for a prescribed wellness retreat.
You could do everything. Or absolutely nothing.
And that, for me, is where Komune gets it right.
The reset I actually wanted
I went to Komune wanting a reset.
I had been sick in the lead-up to the trip and, more than anything, I wanted a few days that were centred around feeling good again. Movement. Good food. Rest. Recovery. An early night without feeling as though I was missing something.
Komune made it incredibly easy to create exactly that.
A perfect day for me looked something like this:
7.30am: Coffee.
8.00am: Reformer Pilates.
9.00am: Breakfast.
9.30am: Cardio or strength class.
10.30am: Recovery Centre, moving between the sauna, cold plunge and warm pool.
Then I was done.
No sightseeing itinerary. No pressure to make the most of every minute.
I could take a book to the adults-only pool, head down to the Beach Club and watch the surf, have a long lunch, book a treatment or simply disappear back to my room.
The Health Hub was one of the real standouts. Komune offers daily yoga, fitness and Pilates classes, along with a 25-metre lap pool and dedicated Recovery Centre with sauna, hot and cold plunge pools and spaces designed for recovery. Classes are booked separately for standard room guests, so it is worth looking at the timetable and booking ahead if movement is going to be an important part of your stay.
I also chose to have an IV treatment during my stay. Komune offers IV therapy through an external provider. It won’t be for everyone, but after being unwell before the trip, I decided it was something I wanted to include in my own reset.
What I appreciated was that wellness at Komune never felt performative.
There were people training seriously. People surfing. People having cocktails beside the pool. People doing yoga. Families chasing children around the lawn. Couples reading books.
Nobody seemed to be doing the same holiday.
Then there’s the spa
My advice: leave room for treatments.
The spa sits within the tropical grounds and has eight treatment rooms, along with beauty and hair services.
My favourites were the Komune Signature Massage with a magnesium bath and the Moonlight Facial.
There is something particularly wonderful about doing a morning of movement and recovery, spending the afternoon beside the pool and then disappearing into a treatment before an early dinner and bed.
Not glamorous nightlife.
Not running between restaurants.
Just feeling incredibly looked after.
And sometimes that is exactly what a holiday needs to be.
The food was a genuine surprise
Resort food can sometimes feel like the practical part of staying somewhere.
At Komune, it became part of the experience.
There is the Beach Club for those long ocean-facing meals and the Health Hub restaurant when you want something fresh and nourishing after training.
My favourites were the tuna poke bowl and the chicken lettuce cups.
I also became very fond of the Bullet Coffee.
And because wellbeing does not need to mean removing every pleasure from your life, they also make a very good martini and margarita.
The resort also has its own market garden, which is incorporated into its broader food offering. It is another small detail, but together these details start to explain why the property feels more considered than simply placing a gym and healthy menu inside a resort.
I went without kids. I’d come back with them.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was how quickly I started imagining a completely different trip to Komune.
This time, I was travelling without my kids, and I absolutely appreciated the adults-only pool.
But the family side of Komune is incredibly well thought through.
The Beach Club pool caters to families and the kids’ facilities include a supervised kids club, trampolines, arts and crafts, a skate bowl, outdoor activities and a mini farm. There are also movies under the stars in the evenings.
It is the kind of setup where you could genuinely have different people wanting completely different things and nobody has to compromise too much.
A surfer can surf.
Someone else can do Pilates.
The kids can disappear into an activity.
Everyone can meet again at the pool.
For our family, I would book a two-bedroom villa with a private pool next time, although Komune offers everything from resort rooms and family suites to beachfront pool accommodation and larger villas. There are also interconnected options for families and groups.
A resort built around a wave
The more time I spent at Komune, the more interested I became in how the resort had evolved.
Because underneath the beautiful rooms, fitness classes and Beach Club is a business that has remained very clear about the thing that gave it its identity in the first place.
Keramas.
Komune co-founder Tony Cannon has written about discovering the wave long before the resort existed and the importance of protecting the surf culture that was already there.
His partner in Komune, Tony de Leede, brought another influence.
De Leede is well known in the Australian fitness and wellness industry. He founded Fitness First Australia and Gwinganna Lifestyle Retreat on the Gold Coast, somewhere I have also been fortunate enough to experience. Cannon credits de Leede’s wellness background with helping Komune evolve from what began as a surfers’ resort into the active lifestyle resort it is today.
When you know that history, the property starts to make more sense.
The wellness facilities don’t feel as though they have been added because wellness became fashionable.
Surfing and recovery naturally belong together.
Movement and nutrition belong together.
It is a very clever piece of brand building because you experience the idea before anyone has to explain it to you.
Komune does not have to repeatedly tell you it is about active living.
You wake up looking at the surf, walk to Pilates, eat breakfast beside a garden, plunge into cold water, lie beside the pool and watch surfers paddle out.
The brand is happening around you.
The people might be the best part
Facilities matter.
Beautiful rooms matter.
Location obviously matters.
But the thing I kept noticing at Komune was the staff.
They were warm, happy, welcoming and seemed genuinely pleased that you were there.
When I met with Komune’s marketing manager, Eka, I asked him about the number of younger Balinese staff working throughout the property.
He explained that Komune works with young people studying tourism, giving them practical training as they prepare to enter the workforce, with many later becoming part of the Komune team.
That stayed with me.
It would be easy to view it simply as hospitality training, but it says something bigger about the role the resort wants to play within the community around it.
Cannon has also written that Komune made an early commitment to build its team from the local village. Today, he says more than 80 per cent of the resort’s staff come from Keramas. He also says the business committed to donating five per cent of after-tax profit to the Keramas village charity for social programs and environmental management.
That local connection matters, especially in a destination like Bali where rapid tourism development can so easily overwhelm the places that made visitors want to come in the first place.
Good hospitality is not simply about making guests feel welcome. It is also about understanding where you are.
And then there’s the bunker.
One of my favourite discoveries had absolutely nothing to do with wellness.
Hidden underground at Komune is a private karaoke room called The Bunker.
You would barely know it exists.
It can be hired privately for celebrations, parties or the kind of night that starts innocently and ends with somebody convinced they should have been a professional singer.
You can spend the morning meditating and the evening doing karaoke.
Nobody is judging.
If you do leave
You may not want to.
But we did find one little local spot worth venturing out for.
Warung Legong is just around the corner, set overlooking the rice paddies.
Crossing the highway on foot is not something I would necessarily recommend unless you have nerves of steel, so organising a pick-up and drop-off is the much better option.
It was one of those simple Bali dinners you remember.
Beautiful setting, relaxed atmosphere and the best nasi goreng I had on the trip.
Then it was back to Komune.
What I’d do next time
I would book my Pilates, fitness classes and spa treatments before arriving if I knew they were priorities.
I would leave plenty of empty space in the itinerary.
I would stay longer.
And I would bring my family.
What I wouldn’t do is arrive with a long list of things I felt I had to experience.
One of Komune’s strengths is that it allows you to decide what kind of holiday you need once you are there.
Maybe it is surf from sunrise.
Maybe it is Pilates, sauna, cold plunge and a massage.
Maybe it is watching your kids skate and swim while you drink a coffee.
Maybe it is a margarita beside the Beach Club pool.
Maybe it is doing almost nothing.
Why Komune stayed with me
I arrived wanting time out. I left feeling like I had actually had it.
There are plenty of beautiful resorts where you come home feeling as though you need another holiday.
Komune gave me the opposite.
Movement when I wanted movement. Rest when I wanted rest. Beautiful food. Ocean. Space.
It gave me the freedom to build a day around how I wanted to feel, rather than what I thought I should be doing.
My husband has known Keramas for years because of the wave out front.
Now I understand why I’ll be coming back for everything around it.
Discover Komune here.
