28-04-2025
A Sri Lankan Feast on a Tropical Modernist Estate
In March 2021, a year into the pandemic, the British Sri Lankan chef Cynthia Shanmugalingam, now 42, was quarantining at a hotel in Ahangama, a town on Sri Lanka's southern coast. She'd traveled from her home in London and was self-isolating ahead of a six-month-long stay with her parents in Nelliady, at the island's northern tip, where she was planning to write her first cookbook. Eventually, she completed a draft of 'Rambutan,' as she titled it (and as she would later call her restaurant in London's Borough Market that opened in 2023). But a less expected outcome of those weeks alone was that she met her future partner, the 46-year-old entrepreneur Joe Lenora; he was based nearby and they started talking online. Last January, they returned to Sri Lanka to get married.
For a venue, they chose Lunuganga, the former country residence of the Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. A leader of the Tropical Modernism movement, Bawa lived and worked on the former rubber plantation, in the beach town of Bentota, for nearly 40 years before his death in 2003, when its care was taken over by a group of his close friends now known as the Geoffrey Bawa and Lunuganga Trust. Today the property — which sits on the shore of the vast Dedduwa Lake and includes 12 acres of lush gardens — operates as a 10-room hotel, although it retains the feel of a private retreat, with worn tile floors, whitewashed walls and furniture and objects from Bawa's collection. 'There are different chairs and tables around the place, or in front of a vista, where [Bawa] would like to take tea or eat lunch,' Shanmugalingam says. 'It has an intimate, personal quality.'
On a warm evening last month, Shanmugalingam was back at the house, this time at the invitation of the Lunuganga Trust, which had asked her to host a dinner there. It was the first in a series of collaborative events between the chef and the property celebrating the region's indigenous and heirloom produce. The gathering included a mix of designers, environmentalists and self-described seed nerds, each of whom had traveled an hour and a half up the west coast from Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital. The festivities began with cocktails beside a butterfly-shaped pond, which shimmered with fireflies as the sun set over the lake, then continued with a family-style feast of lagoon prawns and crab and a jubilant cake-decorating spectacle that took place just moments before a storm rolled in. As the rain fell, the guests sought shelter and one last drink in Bawa's ocher-walled former office, where the scents of TK and TK plants in the garden mingled with the wet night air. It was, Shanmugalingam says, 'the most magical dinner I've done.'
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