Barefoot, and the woman who
gave Ceylon its colour

The experience

Not a shop so much as a place to spend an afternoon

It began with a request from a nun. In the 1960s Sister Good Counsel of the Good Shepherd convent at Wattala asked Barbara Sansoni to help find work for young women in the convent's care. Sansoni, an artist and colourist born in Kandy in 1928, learned the loom, then taught it. She and her husband Hildon financed four village weaving centres. The first cloth was sold from her own house.

Accounts differ on which year counts as the beginning — the weaving programme, the sales from home, or the Barefoot boutique of 1964. What is not in dispute is what followed. A shop called HOUSE in the Fort, then Barefoot at Galle Face Court, then the rambling property at 706 Galle Road that most people mean when they say the name. It grew outward: a bookshop, an art gallery, an outdoor café, a stage. Through the war years it was one of the places in Colombo where people still gathered.