Pure Talent

Created by one champion of Sri Lankan design for another, this home was crafted by a local hero whose rare genius is now enshrined in the culture.

- Stephen Todd

All houses tell a story, some more lyrically than others. The Colombo home that fabled architect Geoffrey Bawa designed for batik artist Ena de Silva in 1960 reads as an ode to international modernism but told with a distinct Sri Lankan lilt. Composed as a series of pavilions and courtyards enclosed within a high compound wall, the house was an oasis of calm in a capital transitioning from leafy garden city to tropical metropolis.

Bawa’s earlier buildings had been inspired by Le Corbusier and the tropical modernism of Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. Flat-roofed concrete volumes in gleaming white grids, these sat stoically in the landscape. But the de Silva houses marked a shift in Bawa’s thinking, marking his desire to draw upon vernacular style to evoke a unique sense of place. Sri Lanka, previously Ceylon, had been a trading post since Roman times and would be colonised from the 16th century on, first by the Portuguese, then the Dutch and finally the British. Each foreign power left marks on the culture that Bawa would mix with regional aesthetics and local techniques to create a new idiom of Sri Lankan architecture.

Arrayed around a main central courtyard, five smaller yards interlink the open-plan volumes of the de Silva house. Pitched timber roof beams are extended to create deep verandah overhangs which allow a seamless flow between inside and out. River stones pave the courtyards, and porch areas are demarcated by granite. The massive timber columns supporting the generous eaves are hewn from local satinwood trees.