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HOUSE TOUR | PLACES & SPACES | CABANA MAGAZINE
Built within Bruce Carpenter's Sanur compound, this Peranakan-inspired garden house museum brings together almost five decades of collecting, research and scholarship under one roof. Part archive, part gallery and part workplace, it reflects one man's lifelong engagement with the art, history and material culture of the Indonesian archipelago. Emma Becque and Iker Zuniga take a tour.
BY EMMA BECQUE | PLACES & SPACES | 16 JULY 2026
Avid collector Bruce Carpenter pictured at home examining 19th-century paintings rendered in the classical style of Kamasan Village in East Bali © Iker Zuniga.
Built in 1998, Bruce Carpenter's "library" is inspired by the neo-classical Peranakan Chinese shophouses that once characterised trading towns across Southeast Asia. The space has been constructed so authentically that it is compellingly accurate to locals. “People don’t believe it,” Bruce says with a smile. “They think it’s always been here.”
The pale grey and pastel façade recalls the colors common in Sanur during the early 20th century. Behind its walls sit an archive, a gallery, an office and a library that have become the centre of Carpenter’s research for almost three decades.
Researchers occupy the ground floor, answering questions from museums and fellow collectors, preparing publications and cataloguing material. Upstairs, paintings, sculpture, ritual objects, ceramics, textiles and books gathered over almost 50 years of living and working across Indonesia unfold from room to room. “We have multiple buildings,” Carpenter says. “We live in another property in the garden.”
Standing apart from the family’s residence yet woven into the daily ritual of the compound, the library is where Bruce writes, photographs objects, advises museums, and welcomes collectors, curators and researchers, with conversations drifting effortlessly from a carved figure from East Java to the prehistoric cave paintings of Sulawesi.
Although visitors come by appointment, the building has never been intended as a public museum. “Most people have no idea what I’m doing,” he says, laughing. “We live with the art,” Bruce says. “I think it’s important to live with your collection, not to store it away like specimens in some sort of insect museum.”
The second floor centers on a rare Semar Pengulingan gamelan from North Bali, a type of ensemble once played in the pleasure gardens of Balinese rajas before nearly disappearing during the early 20th century. Along one wall, Balinese temple sculptures rest on an old Chinese prayer table, while nearby hangs The Rice Harvest (1954) by I Wayan Sudira, a student of Rudolf Bonnet, whose years in Bali helped shape a generation of artists.
On the third floor, there is a storeroom for ritual utensils, baskets, bowls, offering dishes and various oddities from around Indonesia. © Iker Zuniga.
In the perfectly formed space, 19th-century Kamasan paintings share the walls with works by I Made Deblog and Han Snel, while a family of Balinese and Javanese masks occupy an 18th-century table beneath drawings, photographs and prints. Nearby, a carved teak oil lamp in the form of a winged celestial nymph stands beside ceremonial offering bowls from the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi.
Throughout, books are as integral to the building as the objects themselves, reflecting decades of research as much as collecting. Bruce has written or co-authored more than twenty volumes on Indonesian art, including the recently published Masks of Bali: Between Heaven and Hell: Living Mask Traditions and Masterpieces of Masks (2023), the culmination of decades spent studying one of Bali’s most enduring ritual art forms. “When I studied art history,” he says, “anything that wasn’t European art was described as ‘non-Western art’. It was a category defined by what it wasn’t rather than what it was.”
Bruce first arrived in Indonesia in 1976, intending only to travel; instead, a serendipitous beginning: arriving by boat at Parapat on the shores of Lake Toba during a full moon, he was met by Batak singers performing in harmony. “Everything was an adventure,” he recalls, remembering a time when travelling through the archipelago required little more than curiosity and time. One journey became another until Indonesia ceased to be a destination. “Places find you,” he says.
Those years were spent meandering through the archipelago, often to places that had received little attention outside Indonesia. Crossing Sumatra from east to west, Bruce says, revealed why neighbouring communities, separated by mountains, rivers and distance, evolved such distinct artistic traditions.
“You need to understand the culture to understand what was produced by those artisans,” he says. “If scholars write about a particular art and culture, they need to experience the environment in which it was created physically.”
Pictured are a series of Indonesian art, the culture and history library with a table and colonial Art Deco chairs. © Iker Zuniga.
“There’s a very thin line between collecting and hoarding,” Bruce says, laughing. “The difference is that, as a collector, you edit.” His own approach was guided as much by ethics as curiosity. Unlike many collectors, he never travelled through villages in search of objects to acquire. “It felt wrong,” he says, “like going into somebody’s grandmother’s house and persuading her to sell the portrait of her great-grandfather.” Instead, pieces found their way to Sanur only after they had already left their original homes, passing through families, dealers and older collections before eventually arriving on his shelves.
“Objects were study objects,” Bruce says. “They constructed constellations.” A stack of folded Balinese textiles is displayed on one side of the room, around 500 of which will eventually be donated to the Bali Museum once new conservation facilities are complete.
“I think of many of these objects as potential orphans,” he says. “They’ve been taken out of their original environment and no longer have the context they once belonged to. While they’re with me, I want to take care of them. I love them. I learn from them. If I feel there’s a good destination for them, I’ll give them up for adoption.”
The north wall of the library with masks, various hangings, carvings and drawings, paintings and prints. © Iker Zuniga.
That sense of stewardship extends well beyond his own collection, with Bruce recently chairing the committee responsible for developing Bali’s SAKA Museum, bringing together Indonesian historians, museum specialists and international curators to establish a new approach to presenting the island’s cultural heritage.
“I feel it’s part of my responsibility to document these things because they’re disappearing at an accelerating rate,” he says. “People forget what these objects were used for. They forget their ritual and spiritual significance.”
By the time our conversation is over, my notebook contains almost as many names as objects. Bruce has insisted that when I am next in the Netherlands I visit a friend in Haarlem who runs an Indonesian restaurant, while assembling one of Europe's largest collections of historical Asian advertising posters. Another introduction follows, this time to a young patron of batik in London, then to museum directors, scholars and collectors. It feels entirely in keeping with the library itself. Built to house objects, it has become a place where knowledge, ideas and people continue to circulate.
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