Lessons in design from Geoffrey Bawa's Sri Lankan homes

Mint

14 hours ago

Colombo is beautiful, like a sane, disciplined version of Thiruvananthapuram or Bengaluru. Heritage structures sit elegantly beside contemporary buildings in peaceful self-assured coexistence. The traffic is polite; cars keep a safe quarantine line of distance from one another. It is tropical and familiar yet its non-chaos is strangely foreign. It could be India but the city is so orderly and courteous that it doesn't feel like our country—in a bad, good and sad way.
For years I'd wanted to visit Number 11, architect Geoffrey Bawa's home in the Sri Lankan capital, and Lunuganga, his estate in Bentota. Very recently, I made the pilgrimage.
Perusing images of his spaces in books, I always focused on the way he put things together, his skill for cajoling the natural surroundings to provide the vistas he wanted, his seemingly preternatural skill at creating places that taught the viewer how to see. But to see images of Bawa's work without seeing Sri Lanka itself is to miss the intricate ways in which he was influenced by the place where he was born.
Bawa was a citizen of the tropics but spent a significant part of his time as a young adult in Europe, which had a significant impact on him. It was a failed attempt at building a home for himself in Italy that finally brought him back home to Sri Lanka at the cusp of 30. Bawa chose Bentota because that was where his elder brother, the landscape designer Bevis Bawa, lived on a property christened 'The Brief". If you do go on a Bawa pilgrimage then Bevis' property is a must-visit for comparison. The younger brother's estate is a much more architecturally articulated space than Bevis' somewhat ghoulish Brief.
Lunuganga, now a boutique hotel, appears in various garbs, depending on where you look and what you see. Bawa was able to realise here the many scenographies that had impacted his design language. Back in 1949 he took the 25-acre rubber and cinnamon plantation and cut through its rough-and-tough foliage to create multiple personalities. In some parts, the nondescript tropical foliage of the estate has been left to grow, controlled but not manicured. In other scenes, the estate feels European, a disciplined rolling-hill and stone-sculpture montage that could have been in Italy. Somehow Bawa stitched these seemingly incongruous instincts together, placing them quite seamlessly on the estate. He tinkered with Lunuganga for decades, till his death in 2003.
If you work with décor, as I do, it is sometimes difficult to be truly captivated by a space. There's too much criticality and rationalising. So I was surprised to feel so deeply moved at No.11 in Colombo, smaller in scale and ambition than Lunuganga. I felt a deeply emotional stirring in the city property—for the first time ever in response to someone's home. I'm not entirely sure how to explain it, except to admit that my eyes welled up. The space had a feeling of nurturing, of ensconcing, of shelter. I sat on a bench off the side of the living room and with my little notebook and ink pen, tried to make sense of what this home, once occupied by a tall architect whose life had nothing in common with mine, was trying to teach me. What lessons had he left behind?
Architect Channa Daswatte, writing a few years ago in Architectural Digest about Number 11, described the series of cottages that made up the home as an 'extraordinary labyrinth of spaces" that became Bawa's 'inner landscape". Bawa died 22 years ago, and visitors have been traipsing through that inner landscape, which has been under the cloche of time, in tableau, yet it doesn't feel like a mausoleum. There's a cosy energy, the anticipation of someone's arrival. The objects tell you stories about a man you never met, about his whims and its fancies. There's bric-a-brac, precious things and random collectibles, all sitting next to one another; Riten Mozumdar's textiles on one wall, a collection of stones somewhere else.
Bawa's objects told me that for a room, a sense of humour is more important than one may think. Peering into the iconic architect's bedroom from behind the cordon, I could see an orange transparent inflatable armchair at the foot of his bed. On either side of the bed, teddy bears sat comfortably on old wooden chairs. The architect mixed materials and blended high-design with humble materials. Shiny epoxy white paint on the floor reflected and doubled the light coming through a small cutout in the roof of the tunnelled entrance of the home. There were mismatched Sri Lankan colonial armchairs but also a set of furniture resembling Eero Saarinen's plastic Tulip series. Wood sat with metal sat next to textile, next to stone, next to cane—instead of mix-and-match, it was all just mix.
Bawa had a natural ability to create aesthetic balance, and he achieved that perfection with enviable nonchalance. Many of the pieces of furniture seemed like off-cuts or experiments or not designed at all. The checkered lounge at the heart of the living room—the eye-candy of every image taken here—was quite low, with a very deep seat and the perfect throne for a man who was reportedly almost 7ft tall. The pieces in that world were simple, created to exemplify and masquerade shortcomings in craft and material available in those times in Sri Lanka. The side tables and coffee table, in stone and metal, clean-lined perfect impervious partners to the dramatic textile on the sofa. (Incidentally, Bengaluru-based studio Phantom Hands is now exclusively licensed to produce edits of Bawa's furniture designs for the contemporary market.)
I imagined how the very tall architect must have moved around this space, how its scale must have seemed like a cocoon, a womb-ish sanctuary in the centre of his city. Instead of a palace that soared upwards, Bawa's home wrapped itself around him. Its physical features all appeared to have the same intention: to capture and move light appropriately through the cavernous home. Its poetry was personal, a feeling that if you accumulate objects you love, they will sing together like a well-practiced choir, even if some of it is plastic and some of it is stone. Mix it up, don't stay just with wood or just with stone or any other preciousness, let the limitations of the materials, craftsmanship and resources be your guide to simpler, more tactile solutions. Have a bit of fun, Bawa seems to say.
Manju Sara Rajan is an editor, arts manager and author who divides her time between Kottayam and Bengaluru.