Colombo Court Blog The Hotel
The film CNN made about Colombo Court
In 2014 CNN sent a crew to Alfred House Avenue to film how five old office buildings became a hotel. The film still explains us better than we can.
Not long after we opened, a CNN crew spent a day with us. They wanted to understand how a row of old office buildings on Alfred House Avenue had become a hotel, and why we had kept so much of what was already here. The short film they made is still the clearest account of the idea behind Colombo Court, so we have put it on our story page, where you can watch it in under three minutes.
What the film shows
The buildings had been offices for decades, put up at different times and joined together over the years. The easy route would have been to knock them down and start again. Instead, the structures were kept, and the space between them was opened up into a series of planted private courtyards, with the pool running through the middle. The rooms were turned to face the garden rather than the road, which is why every window here looks onto green.
The second idea was to build with what was already on the site. The bricks from the old boundary walls became the floor of the lobby and the library. Timber was reclaimed rather than felled. An old cement mixer became a fountain. The bedside lamps in every room are made from bicycle parts, and the tree that rises through the atrium to the glass roof is welded from bicycle frames and chains by the sculptor Prageeth Manohansa.
Why it still matters
The film was made before we became South Asia’s first CarbonNeutral® city hotel, but the thinking that led there is all in it: keep what you have, waste as little as possible, and let the garden do the cooling. A decade on, the trees are taller, the pool is the same, and the rooms still have their odd corners, because no two of them were ever the same shape.
If you would like to see it for yourself, the rooms are here, and the tree is the first thing you will meet in the lobby.
