NURTURING SHELTER
Sensitively accommodating nature as much as a structure’s inhabitants is this Sri Lankan architect’s signature style.
This page, clockwise from top left Channa Daswatte converted a 200-year-old property into The Kandy House hotel. Sigiriya Water Garden Hotel is set in one of Sri Lanka’s World Heritage sites. The Garden House. Hermitage House. Daswatte’s mentor and friend Georey Bawa designed the Kandalama Hotel. The airy bathroom in Daswatte’s home.
It is easy to see why he has many repeat clients, such as the owner of the Sigiriya Water Garden Hotel. “I said I would design a garden that happened to have rooms in it. It has been a great success and now I am working on a boutique hotel on a magni cent site in Kandy, and potentially a project in the Maldives,” says Daswatte.
Some 150 kilometres from Colombo, Kandy is famous for its tea plantations and is close to Daswatte’s heart. He attended boarding school there and has a weekender lled with art and objets trouvés. He understands the area’s layered history as well as the geography, the connection to the land and the vegetation. He has undertaken a number of projects there such as Hermitage House, a dramatic design de ned by its openness to nature, for a British client living in Paris. Another project that de nes his philosophy is the Garden House in Colombo. “The clients kept asking for more garden and in the end I suggested they live in it. The idea is of minimal shelter with the experience of the garden everywhere,” says Daswatte. As Bawa famously said, “You must ‘run’ with the site; after all, you don’t want to push nature out with the building”. Rather, Daswatte, true to his mentor, has invited it in. micda.com