At Lunuganga in Sri Lanka, you don’t check in — you step into Geoffrey Bawa’s dreamscape

It’s 1989 and you’ve come to stay at a sprawling country estate on Sri Lanka’s western coast. But, “country estate” doesn’t even come close to describing it. This secluded slice of paradise is of such legendary beauty that even Prince Charles once abandoned decorum and invited himself to tea so he could gawk at it.

The owner, a brilliant and celebrated man, was so private that only his similarly brilliant and celebrated artist friends had enjoyed his hospitality. And now, you — yes, little old you — will spend the next few days exploring the rambling gardens, taking tea on the terrace, enjoying sunset tipples on the lawn, and pottering around the house filled with antiques and art pieces.

There are very few hotel stays around the world I would describe as life-changing, but this is exactly what it feels like to stay at Lunuganga, the 15-acre plot of land that served as renowned architect Geoffrey Bawa’s weekend home, creative playground and rural retreat.

WHERE GARDENS TELL STORIES

What makes this stay unlike any other? It is positively haunted, and in the best possible way, by the spirit of Bawa, painstakingly kept alive by a dedicated team of gardeners and groundskeepers who live and work on the property — including those who knew him in his last years.

And, as a guesthouse, it gathers a like-minded collection of travellers: Fellow design lovers on the Bawa trail, making pilgrimages at sites by the visionary “father of Tropical Modernism” in his native country.

It’s no surprise that his fans are numerous. We see the late great architect’s influence today in everything from designer residences to high-end eco-resorts worldwide. The idea that a building should be seamlessly inseparable from its landscape — that it should recede, frame and negotiate rather than dominate — has become almost standard in luxury hospitality.

Here, though, the word “hotel” feels out of place, as there’s nary a corridor, elevator, bellman trolley or reception desk in sight. Instead, lodgings are spread out across the estate, with rooms in the main house including what used to be Bawa’s master suite, and a series of cottages and spaces converted into guest rooms.

The real star is the panoply of gardens, conceived as a series of outdoor rooms that you could spend days discovering.

Lunuganga, about an hour and a half’s drive from Colombo, is not just Bawa’s most famous work, but also his longest relationship. He bought the former rubber estate in 1948, when he was 29 and not yet an architect, and worked on it for more than 40 years. This was before the Architectural Association in London, before the Sri Lankan Parliament commission, before the hotels. Lunuganga became the crucible in which Sri Lankan tropical modernism was tested, refined and occasionally contradicted.

Today, the estate is carefully overseen by the Geoffrey Bawa Trust and the hotel side of things is run by Teardrop Hotels. Many Bawa properties have been far less sensitively repurposed, but here, great care is taken to avoid having the place turn into a lifeless museum while still keeping it exactly as it was.

In fact, after a while, in the labyrinth of blurred indoor-outdoor spaces that is Lunuganga, you begin to feel like you are the ghost there, an ephemeral, impermanent presence in a place without time. The very light here has a fairy-tale quality. The iconic 79-year-old frangipani tree that frames the view of the lake appears to have its own soul. The moss on the stone steps? It’s neither cleared nor allowed to overtake. Instead, it’s maintained just so, as it was in Bawa’s era, an unbroken continuum between past and present.

One of the first things I’m told, when I arrive and am immediately brought through the sitting room to the porch with its stunning view of the lake, is this: “We see time as fluid here, so don’t worry about following strict timings for meals and things like that.”

Instead, it’s nature that dictates the flow of your day, as when guests gather for evening cocktails on the lawn to watch the sun set over the lake, just as Bawa used to do after a day of tinkering. And, tinker he did, for over 40 years.

He repurposed pillars from temples into pavilions. He played with water, light and shadow. He built a giant pond shaped like a butterfly. Numerous creative experiments for his most famous works were carried out here, like the design of wrought iron chairs for the Kandalama Hotel; and a little structure that, by some accounts was a pump house and others a chicken coop but no less quietly amusing either way, is said to have served as a prototype for the Parliament building on the outskirts of Colombo.

Visiting the real Parliament building with its copper roofs and colonnade pavilions gives rise to new appreciation: sitting squarely in the middle of its own still lake, there’s a sense of scale, proportion, history and drama, all balanced with utmost finesse.  

ON THE BAWA TRAIL

But, the touches of mad-scientist whimsy at Lunuganga are not the only reason this place feels like some sort of magical fantasy land. As you enter the estate, the lush tropical jungle opens up to a manicured lawn with classical European elements and a wide view of the lake, then gardens inspired by a mix of global cultures and the great Sri Lankan landscapes of the classical period. All this adds up to a feeling of disorientation that creates the sense of having been transported into a daydream.

“This entire garden is a garden of experience,” said Lunuganga’s Curator of Living Collections Soham Kacker. “There are all these little moments of theatre where you turn a corner and see something. I think that is what makes it really powerful.” Even if the plants themselves are fairly common, “what makes it undeniably Bawa is this sense of choreography and sequence as you move through the garden.”

In addition to fruiting and flowering trees and shrubbery, the nature lover will have a grand old time spotting kingfishers, jungle fowl, mongooses, monkeys, porcupines and the occasional peacock roaming the grounds. Even the chipmunks eagerly come to breakfast with you. But, Bawa’s singular vision sought a different kind of creature.

"He wrote about how he would like for this landscape to have this sense of enchantment and mystery. There is a famous line about how he would like to, just occasionally, see a leopard or a centaur walking through the grounds,” Kacker said. This vision manifested itself in an “enchanted space that kind of exists midway between reality and fantasy, because it was his fantasy”.

If this was Bawa’s Narnia, his Colombo home, which guests can visit by appointment, was his real life, where he spent his work week. Many things here, including his bedroom, are kept exactly as they were during his time, down to the dog bed for his beloved Dalmatian. While the principles of design remain the same, the vibe here is more polished and urbane. This, perhaps, is where he might have received visits from cosmopolitan friends and associates.

A few streets over is his former office, which is now a cafe known as The Gallery Cafe; his former desk now holds a display of cake stands.

But, Lunuganga is where he would have invited the friends he really vibed with. One life lesson to be learned is the importance of framing and reframing your life. Just as Bawa meticulously framed views in doorways like a obsessive film director and even repositioned trees for better visual composition, he was selective about who he let into his country escape.

“The sense I get is that he was a very private person who enjoyed coming here as a bit of a respite from everything, and allowed a very select group of people into this almost enchanted world of his,” Kacker shared.

These friends were frequently artists who drew inspiration from the same things, and left their art behind as tokens of affection: sculpted vases by Donald Friend, batik fabrics by Ena De Silva and frescoes by Laki Senanayake. 

In a similar style, Senanayake crafted the breathtaking sculpture that forms the sweeping balustrade staircase at another of Bawa’s projects, the Jetwing Lighthouse hotel in Galle. A parade of Sri Lankan and Portugese soldiers marches upward in a brass and copper spiral in an epic battle. At the top, you emerge to a view of the crashing sea framed, in characteristic Bawa fashion, to look exactly like a masterful painting.  

Ironically, what Bawa really seems to begin to say, after looking at his celebrated works of architecture, is that a building is just bricks and mortar. The life sheltering inside it can only thrive if there is life around it.

When his friend, the inventor Ray Wijewardene, crash-landed his micro-light aeroplane on the roof of Lunuganga’s main bungalow in 1988 and broke some tiles, Bawa reportedly said, don’t worry about those — have you damaged the tree?

How much of what we preoccupy ourselves with in life is replaceable, while at the same time, we neglect and even destroy the irreplaceable?

A place like Lunuganga frames perspectives — quite literally — with the uncomplicated magic of a living, breathing creature kept alive by water, air, memories and devotion. 

CNA Luxury was in Sri Lanka at the invitation of Teardrop Hotels.