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When you visit Geoffrey Bawa’s house in this quiet corner of Colombo, don’t forget to greet the peacock who acts as sentinel for the street where the architect redeveloped a cluster of buildings into his domestic masterpiece.
Bawa, son of a wealthy Muslim lawyer father and Burgher mother, led Sri Lanka’s cultural renaissance after independence in 1948. A Tropical Modernist, he rejected colonial architectural styles that ignored their surroundings, speaking of the need to look “Ceylon [Sri Lanka] squarely in the face”. And at “Number 11”, his Colombo residence for more than four decades, he blended east with west and traditional with modern while showing a heightened sensitivity to the tropical terrain and climate.
On a small, enclosed site in the upscale Colombo 7 district, Bawa first rented one property in an alley off 33rd Lane in 1959, then another. It was only nine years later when another two came up for sale that he had the opportunity to buy all four units and radically remodel the block.
There are unexpected juxtapositions even at the tour’s starting point — sleek latticed wooden garage doors sit below a reclaimed ornamental balustrade; stunning original and replica batiks by Bawa’s friend Ena de Silva watch over his cherished Rolls-Royce. Before walking down a white covered hallway, the former alleyway to the old bungalows, we are asked to remove footwear, aiding what the trust calls a “multisensory experience”.
Divisions blur between exterior and interior spaces and personal and public settings. Natural light from tree and water features suffuses the rear of the house, which links seamlessly via a narrow white staircase to the Modernist villa and rooftop terrace built on the site of the first bungalow. Guests can stay on the latter’s upper floor.
Visitors dawdle to snap the unusual combinations that speak to Bawa’s playful bricolage approach: a stately row of Chettinad carved wooden columns at the corridor’s end disrupted by a horse’s head sculpture; a concrete dining table surrounded by curvaceous Eero Saarinen chairs; the linear patterns on a seat cover by his textile designer friend Barbara Sansoni below a fabric mural of Venn circles.
“There’s much appreciation for the many individual objects throughout the house,” says Shayari de Silva, chief curator. “But also the way they work together with each other, and the way they interact with the architecture of the house.”
I notice a stack of records in a roped-off area and a big wood-encased speaker in the first-floor lounge. “He had an incredible collection of music . . . and a lot of really fantastic music equipment,” says De Silva, citing his eclectic tastes. Bawa loved to listen to music with friends or alone both at No 11 and Lunuganga, a lagoon-side estate in Sri Lanka’s south and his rural idyll.
Bawa died at No 11 in 2003 and was buried by a tree at Lunuganga. But his imprint is all over Sri Lanka in temples, universities and government buildings. As the country recovers from recent economic and political crises, skyscrapers are going up at a fast rate in his old stamping grounds of Galle Face Green and Colombo 7, while many of the hotels he designed are brimming with tourists again.
The visitors flocking to the trust’s properties — a record 5,500 people visited No 11 last year — reflect this wider revival. And the constant flow of tuk-tuks and vans pulling in and out of 33rd Lane makes it a busy patch for the hardy peacock.
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