15/08/2023
Hello 👋
We are the Joneses, the family behind JOJU. We are British, but Singapore-based. I just wanted to re-introduce us, in case anyone was curious about who is behind the epic villa and poorly made reels 😃
I am Michelle, married to Ben. We loved our Bali trips before kids - with long weekends spent at fancy beach resorts. This is back when my biggest holiday peeve was accidentally sleeping-in and missing the hotel breakfast (the innocence! What I wouldn’t give to wake up and find I’d slept in to lunch now 😂)
So when we had our first child and we went back to Bali as a family, we were shocked to discover that our holidays were now an absolute circus 😂😂 The fancy hotel rooms we had so loved pre-kids, left us spending our evenings eating room service in near silence for fear of waking the baby. We tried to stay at a few villa resorts, but found that though the properties were beautiful, they were potential death traps once we had a toddler in tow. I am still traumatised by the memory of pulling our daughter out of a water feature she had managed to get her 99th percentile head stuck in 🫣
Also, the sheer amount of stuff we had to take - gone were the carry-on days - toys, monitors, medicines and thermometers ‘just incase’. We struggled without the larger bits of kit we had at home too - baby bath, baby chairs, play mats, swim floaties, steriliser. Our Bali holidays used to feel restorative, but we would get back from ‘holiday’ absolutely exhausted.
And so in 2016, pregnant with number 2, we bit the bullet and bought the land leasehold to build our own villa. We designed JOJU and Villa JOJU Alit (we named our concrete children after our human ones Jolie, Jude and Joshie) to be a sanctuary for this chapter of our lives while our kids are small. Our goal was to build a place that addressed all of the concerns and challenges that we faced as parents with young kids on holiday. Somewhere where the kids could be happy, safe and occupied, and where we could catch a break 🤣
Continued in comments! 📜