How an 18th century Dutch house was restored by an ex-Hong Kong resident

South China Morning Post

18-02-2025

Published: 1:12pm, 18 Feb 2025 In the summer of 2004, Peter Harris, president of Pedder Group – a division of Hong Kong's Lane Crawford Joyce Group – visited Sri Lanka for the first time. He travelled for hours in darkness from Colombo down to Galle to stay at what was then called The Dutch House. It had been built by a retired Dutch admiral in the early 18th century and was run by Australian boutique-hotelier Geoffrey Dobbs. When Harris woke, he felt, as travellers often have in the Land of Serendip, that he'd landed in paradise. A pattern began: every Christmas he would take his Australian family – his mother, two sisters, his nieces and nephew – to the house and he'd feel the urge for permanence and look around for his own place. He estimates he saw almost 30 possibilities. Nowhere matched up.
Then, in January 2021, during Covid-19, he received a one-line email from Dobbs asking if he'd be interested in taking over the property's lease. In May 2021, after almost 30 years in Hong Kong and Shanghai, he left Pedder Group. By August, having completed quarantine, he was living in one room while restoration – not renovation, he insists – took place around him. Doornberg in Galle, Sri Lanka. Photo: Sebastian Posingis
'I wanted to live a modern life respecting the structure of a very old house,' he says on a recent morning in an acre of garden vibrant with the sights and sounds of magnificent birds. (The road between Galle and Colombo has warning signs: 'Danger Peacocks Ahead'.) The 10,000 sq ft house has reverted to its original name, which, along with its original construction date, is incised into the step at the entrance: Doornberg 1712. Work took a year. The last major overhaul had been sensitively carried out in 2002 by architect Channa Daswatte, a pupil of Sri Lanka's master of Tropical Modernism, Geoffrey Bawa . Previously, Doornberg had been the site, in 1814, of the first Wesleyan Methodist school in Asia – 'a very retired and romantic spot', reported the missionaries – and later became a small orphanage. (By a quirk of colonial history, it is still owned by the Church of England.) On a hilltop overlooking the sea it had, as the artist and designer Barbara Sansoni wrote in 1998's The Architecture of an Island, 'the lovely sweep of roof and minimum four pillars of the best Ceylon Dutch houses'. The library. Photo: Sebastian Posingis
It was built in an L-shape and Daswatte added a wing behind the main house. This gave the property an elegant balance: the deep, covered veranda on three sides acts as a clasp around a perfectly proportioned rose apple tree. But both house and tree had fallen into decline. Harris set out on a revival mission.