Mix and play to bring a bit of Bawa into your home

Colombo is beautiful, like a sane, disciplined version of Thiruvananthapuram or Bengaluru. Heritage structures sit elegantly beside contemporary buildings in peaceful self-assured coexistence. The traffic is polite; cars keep a safe quarantine line of distance from one another. It is tropical and familiar yet its non-chaos is strangely foreign. It could be India but the city is so orderly and courteous that it doesn't feel like our country—in a bad, good and sad way.

- MANJU SARA RAJAN

For years I'd wanted to visit Number 11, architect Geoffrey Bawa's home in the Sri Lankan capital, and Lunuganga, his estate in Bentota. Very recently, I made the pilgrimage.

Perusing images of his spaces in books, I always focused on the way he put things together, his skill for cajoling the natural surroundings to provide the vistas he wanted, his seemingly preternatural skill at creating places that taught the viewer how to see. But to see images of Bawa's work without seeing Sri Lanka itself is to miss the intricate ways in which he was influenced by the place where he was born.

Bawa was a citizen of the tropics but spent a significant part of his time as a young adult in Europe, which had a significant impact on him. It was a failed attempt at building a home for himself in Italy that finally brought him back home to Sri Lanka at the cusp of 30. Bawa chose Bentota because that was where his elder brother, the landscape designer Bevis Bawa, lived on a property christened "The Brief". If you do go on a Bawa pilgrimage then Bevis' property is a must-visit for comparison. The younger brother's estate is a much more architecturally articulated space than Bevis' somewhat ghoulish Brief.