Royston Ellis

Researching unusual hotels to feature in the new edition of The Bradt Guide to Sri Lanka, discovers a fun place, Ella Mount Heaven

Ithink I have discovered the most unusual hotel bedroom in Sri Lanka: one with a swimming pool inside the bedroom, not outside in the garden or by the beach as in other hotels that boast rooms with private swimming pools. This extraordinary bedroom is part of an extraordinary, even eccentric, new hotel in a scenic location in the hills: Ella.

Ella has developed over the years into a tourist haven because of visitors who stop there overnight on their way to Arugam Bay. Backpackers discovered the sleepy hill town when it only had a rest house (now the Grand Ella Motel) and stayed in makeshift accommodation in local houses. To cater for the increasing number of surprise visitors, new guesthouses opened, followed by roadside restaurants offering European staples like cappuccino, pasta and fish and chips. With its independent, people-inspired development, Ella became the Hikkaduwa of the hills.

Now Ella boasts a new hotel to outshine any of the others. It’s called Ella Mount Heaven and is located 3.5km south of Ella on the A23 road to Ravana Falls (within walking distance) and Wellawaya, and on to the south, within a couple of hours of the new airport at Mattala and the developments at Hambantota. The hotel clings to the side of a steep gorge, rooms constructed solidly into the rock, with magnificent views of a phalanx of hills rolling to the south, with streams of mist flowing between them.

There, two of the hotel’s rooms have the unbelievable and heavenly concept of a private swimming pool just steps away from the bed and shielded from the variable weather by a panoramic glass wall revealing the hills and passing clouds. The room I stayed in, number 4, contains one double and two single beds (all delightfully comfortable) in a spacious area with tiled floor. Steps away from the bed, flush to a wooden deck, is the interior swimming pool with a chrome ladder descending into the cool chlorinated water. The pool’s big enough for a couple of strokes and for floating blissfully without even leaving the bedroom.

Open a door beside the pool and there are steps up to an open-sided balcony where you can test the climate, work at a side table, or breakfast as the sun rises while seated in furniture created from tree trunks. The room has a large attached bathroom (with hot water), wicker chairs, a vanity desk but curiously no clothes cupboard only wooden pegs. The walls are half wood panelled and bright murals (there’s one of an elephant overlooking the pool) adorn the walls.

Although it is still under construction with as yet only eight rooms in operation out of a proposed 25, it is easy to sense the enjoyment that guests will have when all is completed. There are rooms of several categories, some like upmarket dormitories with trios of beds in an orderly row, some cosy for couples, and one even has its own kitchen for self-catering. The rooms are spread over four floors (there’s a seafood restaurant on the top, fifth floor) with corridors rambling between them.

Some rooms have been constructed around protruding rocks so nature is a feature not a hindrance to the design. All rooms have flat-screen television and Wi-Fi. The cement walls and concrete pillar construction is gaudily camouflaged by rock-like scalloping or bold Mediterranean-style paintings, including one trompe l’oeil that incorporates a real lamp with a painted stand.

The design owes much to the owner’s previous hotel, Mount Field Cottages at Haldemulla, but here all the rooms are contained in one rambling building instead of in random cottages. There is a crew of eager youngsters on hand to serve guests, and cooks specialising in local, Chinese, seafood and gourmet dishes.

As an owner-designed hotel full of surprises, with secret landings, a corridorlong fish pond, and a smoking chamber, Mount Heaven won’t appeal to those used to conventional properties. There are lots of staircases and dark crannies. This is defiantly (I chose that word deliberately) not a “boutique” hotel but one man’s original creation of what he believes a hotel should be. In one word, based on my stay at Ella Mount Heaven one weekend recently, the hotel can be summed up as “fun!”

Ella Mount Heaven Hotel, Wellawaya Road, Ella. Reservations, tel: 0777 695387; email: ellamountheaven@gmail.com; www.ellamountheaven.com

B&B room rates start at Rs. 9,500 double, with the premium pool rooms at an introductory rate of Rs. 12,500.