A visit to Lunuganga, the famous home cum estate of Sri Lanka’s much lauded architect Geoffrey Bawa, is almost like a rite of passage for architects. Located in Bentota, a few hours out of Colombo, Lunuganga is a mesmerizing place, a carefully orchestrated landscape, all light and space and beauty.
Geoffrey Bawa was born in Sri Lanka in 1913 to a wealthy Muslim lawyer and his Dutch Burgher wife. Trained as a lawyer in Cambridge, he returned to Sri Lanka, to practise and discovered that it was not to his liking. Around the same time, his brother Bevis Bawa acquired a rubber plantation in Bentota, which he was slowly transforming into a landscaped garden with the help of an eclectic group of friends – artists, sculptors, painters, etc. Bawa was interested enough to buy the adjoining estate on the banks of the Dedduwa Lake, which he named Lunuganga (Salt River in Sinhalese). The estate covered 8 hectares spanning two hillocks and with a promontory onto Dedduwa Lake. It consisted of an old estate bungalow and had groves of listless rubber and other overgrown trees. Over the next 40 years, this was slowly manipulated into the wonder that is Lunuganga today. Swathes of rubber trees were cut, indigenous trees and bushes were planted and avenues were planned, opening up the views to the lake and creating quiet restful places.
Bawa’s growing interest in landscape design and architecture, saw him return to London and take up architectural studies, from where he qualified and returned at the age of 38. Lunuganga became the testing ground for his ideas, his retreat from his thriving architectural practice in Colombo, a place to meet and entertain his friends from all over the world, and on his death, the place where he was buried, on the summit of Cinnamon Hill, the highest point on the estate.
The entrance to Lunuganga is unprepossessing and discreet. A rust splattered gate with a bicycle bell on top. No signpost and no gatehouse announcing the home and final resting place of Sri Lanka’s favourite son. Not sure if we were at the right place, we rang the tiny bell and waited. All around us trees closed in greenly and screened the sun. It was quiet in the way a clearing in a forest would be.
A short wait later, a gentleman in an immaculate lungi and shirt padded to the gate and confirmed that this was indeed the entrance to Lunuganga and asked us to follow him. The path meandered upwards and led to the main house and the building that used to be Bawa’s office and studio. This is a double storey structure with clerestory lighting, with windows and doors that were salvaged from Colombo houses slated for demolition. Bawa’s table is strategically placed, to view the gardens sweeping down from in front of the studio and onwards to glimpses of the lake.
Bells are a feature at Lunuganga. Bawa placed them at various points of the esatate, each with a distinct ring. Near his breakfast table, down by the lake, in the office, by the Blue pavilion etc. This was to enable his staff to know exactly where he was when a particular bell was rung and to where they were being summoned!
In Lunuganga it is hard to separate the buildings from the outdoors, yet each is a harmonious blend of each other. There are a couple of shelters dotted across the landscape that serve no purpose other than to provide a place to sit and contemplate the view from that particular aspect. Windows are placed to frame a particular vista, shrubs are planted in an avenue to direct the eye towards the lake and a pond in the shape of a butterfly has leafy branches sweeping gently into it. Cheeky cherubs peep out from the underbrush, Italianate statues guard the edges of the garden, dragonflies skim the surfaces of the water bodies and blue ferns are planted next to the blue painted gazebo.
Lunuganga today is owned by the Geoffrey Bawa Trust and is run as a boutique hotel offering six suites and one extraordinary garden. Furniture in the rooms were all carefully designed or chosen by Bawa, and the trust has scrupulously maintained the place as it must have been when it was Bawa’s own house. This translates to a gentle, gracious way of living. A building which is so much a part of the landscape surrounding it, that it becomes difficult to separate the boundaries between built and nature. This is the aspiration or should be the aspiration for architects and designers practicing in the tropics. Seamlessly bridging the gap between the indoors and the outdoors. Yes, modern living does not always allow us to do so. Dust, crime, insects etc are impediments to maintaining the flow of indoors to the outdoors without barriers of some sort. But here in Lunuganga, civilization is gently held back. Time slows down and what we are left with is a sense of calm and peace. Quiet contemplation of nature in a gentle laidback manner, and tying it all together, the genius of Geoffrey Bawa, still holding all the strings together.
It is no exaggeration to say that Bawa changed the face of South East Asian architecture, especially resort architecture as we know it, from Sri Lanka to Bali to Singapore, but he did it in such a subtle manner, with methods that seem all too obvious now when examined closely, that his contribution is sometimes unrecognised. Lunuganga is much the same. Its extraordinary beauty draws you in in stages. There is no formal layout, no rigid geometry, no rules of traditional garden design but an elegant transition from terraces to groves of trees, from water meadows to hilltop vistas, that you are seduced into thinking that it all just one serendipitous organic growth. But its very wilderness and carefully maintained air of casualness hides the enormous amount of work and labour that has gone into transforming nature and building into an amalgamation of great beauty.
Novelist Michael Ondaatje called Lunuganga an “architectural self-portrait”. He even used it as a setting in his book ‘Anil’s Ghost’ and describes it thus: “ Each vista, each location feels like another elegy or another voice….You discover you wish to be at one location at noon, another at twilight, some when you are young, others later in life.”
Kavya Thimmaiah-Prasanna is an Associate Architect with Thimmaiah & Prabhakar and a mom. And when she is not building residential, commercial and recreational projects or doing up the interiors of residences, she is busy travelling to exotic places, reading, sampling food and life and enjoying it all in equal measure.