Signature move

How Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa's landmark Ena de Silva House was transported brick by brick to a new location, in a remarkable preservation effort

- DAVEN WU

In 1960, when Ena de Silva and her husband Osmund were casting about for an architect to build their family home on a small plot they’d just bought in Colombo, her friend, the landscaper Bevis Bawa, suggested his younger brother, Geoffrey, who had just started practising. De Silva, a bona fide aristocrat from Kandy in central Sri Lanka, hesitated. She’d seen the architect around town in his Rolls-Royce, his blond tresses and silk scarf fluttering in the wind, and had been decidedly unimpressed. Dilettante, she famously thought.

To her surprise, she and Bawa hit it off, and the pair became lifelong friends and collaborators. A renowned batik artist, de Silva went on to work on many of Bawa’s landmark projects, including the Lighthouse and Kandalama hotels. But it is the home Bawa and his partner, Ulrik Plesner, designed for de Silva at 5 Alfred Place – then a quiet area with bungalows and cinnamon gardens – that set the bedrock of their relationship.

De Silva wanted a house with traditional Kandyan features: high walls enclosing opensided rooms, internal courtyards and loggias. And no glass or windows. In later years, Bawa remembered de Silva as wanting just ‘brick walls and a roof ’, the antithesis of his designs at the time, which were essentially tropical takes on Le Corbusier’s smooth silhouettes.