Design · Colombo
Geoffrey Bawa ran his practice from 2 Alfred House Road for three decades. Since 1998 it has been a restaurant and gallery, converted with his blessing and almost none of his interference.
The experience
The building at 2 Alfred House Road was Geoffrey Bawa's town office, the place his practice worked from while it was rewriting how Asia built for its own climate. It is a linked-pavilion plan, which is to say a set of rooms strung around courtyards rather than stacked into a block, and it does what all his buildings do: it moves you through shade and light rather than down a corridor.
Shanth Fernando took it over in 1998 and turned it into a restaurant and art gallery under his Paradise Road name. Bawa approved the conversion personally and, by the account of the people who did it, offered exactly one instruction — where the main dining pavilion should go. Everything else he left alone. He died in 2003.
What to expect
Good to know
Colombo, in a route
Best done from Colombo, with the rest of the route built around it.
