Colombo Court Blog The Hotel
The art and the architecture, room by room
Colombo Court sits in the city’s artistic quarter, a few streets from Geoffrey Bawa’s old office. A walk through the hotel, and the makers behind what you see.
Alfred House Avenue is in the part of Colombo 3 that has always drawn artists and architects. Geoffrey Bawa, the greatest of Sri Lanka’s architects, kept his office a few streets away, in what is now the Gallery Café, and sketched the country’s Parliament there. Paradise Road and Barefoot, the two design shops the city is known for, are minutes away on foot. The hotel belongs to that neighbourhood, and it was made by people who belong to it too.
The buildings
Colombo Court was converted from five old office buildings, the oldest of them more than seventy years old, by the environmental architect Sunela Jayewardene. Her brief was to keep the structures and open up the space between them. The result is a series of private courtyards and a long garden, with the pool at its centre and the rooms turned inward to face it. Bricks from the old boundary walls became the floors. Old railway sleepers line the lobby ceiling. The open-plan spaces need no air-conditioning; the garden cools them.
The sculptor
Prageeth Manohansa works in discarded metal, and his pieces are everywhere here. The tree in the lobby, made from bicycle frames and chains, rises three floors to the glass roof with birds in its branches. The largest bird, in the garden, is known to the team as Timothy. Ferns in the darker corners turn out, on a second look, to be welded from old fishing hooks and car parts. The bases of the bedside lamps in every room are bicycle parts too.
The photographs
The black and white photographs in the Scarlet Room and along the corridors are portraits and landscapes of Sri Lankan life by local photographers, chosen because they show the island as it is on an ordinary day. The chairs on the roof are woven from waxed paper, which weathers the monsoon better than it sounds.
The details
The bar stools in The Loft are tractor seats. The fountain in the private courtyard was a cement mixer. The library, with its brick floor and floor-to-ceiling shelves, keeps a shelf of magazines left behind by the family who lived in one of the buildings. None of this was added for effect. It is what was here, given a second use.
Writers and film-makers have used the hotel as a base over the years, and we suspect it is because every corner is different from the last. Our story has the longer version, and the rooms are where you get to live in it.
