Alejandra Cisneros of Studio Magnolia has spent two decades quietly building some of the most soulful homes on the island.
In 2003, Alejandra Cisneros came to Bali on vacation. She had studied architecture at UC Berkeley, had spent fifteen years designing homes across California, Hawaii, Mexico, Canada, and Argentina, and had no particular plan to stop. And then Bali happened — and she never left. I know the feeling! It’s the kind of story that could be a cliche until you see what she’s built here, at which point it becomes the only logical ending.
Through her studio, Studio Magnolia, Alejandra has spent over two decades doing something that sounds straightforward and is anything but: making homes that actually belong to Bali. Not homes that reference it, borrow from it, or package it for foreign consumption — homes that are genuinely, materially, philosophically rooted in this place. In a design landscape crowded with imitation, that kind of integrity is rare. It’s also why her work keeps finding its way onto our radar..
The Antidote to Bali-Style
Bali has a design problem. Over the past two decades, a particular aesthetic has taken hold — the “tropical villa formula”, replicated endlessly across the island’s rice terraces and clifftops, each one more interchangeable than the last. Infinity pool, open-plan pavilion, neutrals and natural fibre, done. I know it well. It photographs well. It’s also largely soulless.
Alejandra’s work is a direct and considered refusal of all of that. She builds with antique Javanese teakwood joglos — traditional timber structures centuries old — transplanted into the Balinese landscape and reimagined for the way people actually want to live now. One side of the house is always open, dissolving the line between interior and exterior, between the built and the natural. The result is somewhere between architecture and ecology: a home that doesn’t just sit in its landscape but belongs to it.
A Conspiracy of Materials and Culture
What Alejandra calls her process is a conspiracy — of client, joglo, land, Balinese craftsmanship, and culture. It’s a useful word. It describes something that happens between parties, collectively, under the surface. Her designs aren’t imposed on a site; they emerge from negotiation with it. The land tells her something. The structure of the joglo tells her something. The craftsmen she works with — the Balinese artisans who bring the vision to reality — tell her something. The client, ideally, also tells her something.
Underpinning all of it is Tri Hita Karana — the Balinese concept of cosmological balance between people, the environment, and the divine. It’s not a philosophy Alejandra applies as decoration or concept; it’s one she has absorbed over more than twenty years of living and building here. Her homes are fanciful and practical in equal measure — built for potters and poets, artists and entrepreneurs, an international clientele from across the Americas, Europe, and Asia who come to Bali looking for something they can’t easily name and find it in a Studio Magnolia house.
The Life Behind the Work
Alejandra grew up between the United States and Argentina, with an Argentine mother and Cuban father — a household full of art, music, and languages. She speaks four: English, Spanish, French, and Indonesian. One of her childhood homes was designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, which perhaps explains both her architectural instincts and her lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between inside and outside. She detoured through documentary photography before returning to design, which probably also explains something about how she sees.
She has since written about all of it. Her book Seen | Unseen: Embracing Natural Home Design in Bali is both a monograph of her work and a manifesto for a different way of thinking about what it means to build in a place like this — with reverence, with curiosity, and without the arrogance of assuming the island exists as a backdrop for someone else’s vision.
Why This Work Matters Now
At a moment when the conversation about overdevelopment in Bali has never been louder — when the question of what’s being lost, and at what speed, is finally being asked seriously — Alejandra’s practice reads as a kind of proof of concept. That it’s possible to build here with genuine respect for the place. That traditional structures don’t have to be museum-ified to remain relevant. That the best response to a fragile environment isn’t to stop building but to build better, and more honestly.
Her canvas is the Bali landscape. Her materials are Java’s ancient teakwood and Indonesia’s natural palette. Her collaborators are the Balinese craftspeople who have shaped this island’s built environment for generations. The homes that come from all of that are unlike anything else being built here. They feel inevitable in the best possible way — as if the land had been waiting for exactly this.
We are proud to feature Alejandra Cisneros as part of our Design Narratives series. Her work is a reminder of what’s possible when architecture starts with listening.
— Sheila, Bali Interiors
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Studio Magnolia · Ubud, Bali
@studiomagnoliabali · magnoliabali.com
Book: Seen | Unseen: Embracing Natural Home Design in Bali
