The hotel's rooms are cool and comfortable and have recently been upgraded with rattan and wood furnishings, while piles of shimmering bougainvillea and hibiscus crowd on to their terraces.
It was once the island governor's home and inside you can still feel a sense of that – but it has been adapted and added to, to create eight one- and two-bedroom beach apartments with rattan furniture and bright floral fabrics.
There's a small pool, rattan sofas under a pergola and a barbecue for sizzling fish.
It provides no tax revenues for the government, which owns it, and only a modest income for the local Dayaks, in rattan, honey and game.
Nobody owns the forest or wilderness where rattan usually grows and as a result it is increasingly scarce.Establishing such property rights is hard; it may mean the exclusion of "outsiders", often other poor people or even refugees, from using wildlife resources.
But some Timorese had to run a gauntlet of rattan canes.
She approached the dressing table, slipped into the rattan chair.
The freshly painted interior and beautifully restored rattan benches around the central bimah (platform) are the work of only about 20 resident Jews.
In 2001, for example, bank researchers in Timor-Leste diligently recorded whether a household bathed under a shower or in the river; used a flush toilet or a bucket; built their home from brick or rattan, and so forth.
They still depend on it for rattan, fuel, honeybees, hunting and wood to build their houses and boats.
Their process starts by heating rattan in the absence of oxygen, preserving the wood's structure while reducing its organic molecules to pure carbon.
