Geoffrey Bawa’s Colombo Home and Office
Tucked discreetly away at the end of a narrow lane in central Colombo, just out of reach of the city’s Main street and high-rise hotels, hides one of Asia’s most quietly influential houses, architect Geoffrey Bawa’s personal residence and city home-office, known as Number 11. To step into this home is to step into the embodiment of a design philosophy known as tropical modernism, which reimagined what it means to dwell in the tropics, to live between nature and modernity, and between the local and the global.
Tropical modernism emerged in the mid-20th century as an accommodation of European modernism to the climatic, cultural, and material realities of the tropics. The architectural movement sought to reconcile the clean geometry and open planning of modernist design with the heat, humidity, and monsoon rhythms of regions such as South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Early experiments by colonial architects within these regions treated climate as an obstacle to be overcome. But following the major wave of decolonisation and colonial independence throughout the 1940s, 1950s and ’60s, a new generation of local architects reinterpreted modernism as a language of cultural autonomy.
In Sri Lanka, Geoffrey Bawa became its most lyrical exponent, developing a new modern architecture that was inseparable from landscape, weather, and local craftsmanship. His buildings, including Number 11 in Colombo, embody the principles of the movement: sensitivity to climate, a deep respect for local craft and materials, abundant use of courtyards and gardens for ventilation and repose, and a seamless blending of the indoors with the outdoors.
Socially, tropical modernism emerged within a complex post-colonial moment. Bawa, who was both educated and affluent, belonged to the Westernised social class with access to both resources and commissions that most of Sri Lanka’s citizens did not have. Using these privileges, he began to redefine modernity in non-Western terms, suggesting that progress could emerge from indigenous forms rather than only from imported styles. The resulting architecture was at once cosmopolitan and local.
In Bawa’s hands, the philosophy became not just aesthetic but embodied. The buildings he designed unfolded as journeys through light and shadow, dissolving walls between architecture and landscape, intellect and emotion. While often commissioned by governments and large commercial enterprises such as hotel groups, it was his work for wealthy, like-minded individuals that created the fertile soil for Bawa to explore and experiment with what would become some of the movement’s core principles. Sensibilities that today might be understood through the lens of sustainability and ecological design, such as natural ventilation, passive cooling, and the use of local materials, were tested and refined through architectural experimentation on the canvas that wealthy patrons, many of whom were Bawa’s friends, provided. Contemporary architects across the tropics continue to draw from these lessons, blending vernacular wisdom with modern technique to create buildings that breathe, age, and blend in. Ultimately, tropical modernism became less a style than a sensibility. It asked how buildings might respond to their environment rather than resist it, and how they might serve modern life without severing cultural roots.
Bawa was born in 1919 in Galle, on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, into a well-off, mixed-heritage family. His father, a wealthy lawyer of Arab descent, and his mother, from a prominent Dutch-Burgher lineage, placed him among the island’s well-off, Western-educated class. The Burgher community, descended from European settlers, occupied a distinctive social stratum in colonial Ceylon — culturally hybrid, English-speaking, and often closer to British customs than to indigenous life.
Educated at Royal College in Colombo and later at Cambridge University, Bawa’s early years unfolded within this milieu of privilege and cosmopolitanism. He studied law, travelled widely in Europe, and moved in circles that few Sri Lankans of the time had access to. This access to a sense of worldliness would not only inform his architectural sensitivity but also ease his path to securing his place in architectural history beyond Sri Lanka and South Asia.
When Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948, it faced the challenge of defining its own modern identity. For Bawa, who returned home from Europe this same year and pivoted from law to architecture not long after, this meant a cultural reorientation and the beginning of the development of a contemporary aesthetic that could belong to his island and yet remain conversant with international art and design. In 1957, after qualifying as an architect at the age of 38, his work soon began to articulate this ambition. He learned to fuse modern spatial clarity with the textures of vernacular building that included lime-washed walls, clay tile roofs, courtyards, water, greenery and shade. This synthesis became known as tropical modernism: an architecture neither purely colonial nor doctrinally modernist, but something distinctly of its place.
The house at number 11 began as a single two-story terrace house, which Bawa rented in 1959. Over time, he purchased not only number 11 but, slowly acquired the three adjacent properties as well, gradually merging them into a single, interlocking composition. Rather than demolishing and rebuilding, Bawa’s method was incremental. He worked with what existed, opening courtyards where there had been walls, piercing light shafts through ceilings, replacing opaque barriers with timber lattice or glass. The resulting house was not a single, uniform entity but an assemblage — a collage of interconnected spaces that grew organically with the architect’s life.
Bawa’s approach was one of quiet refinement. The luxury of Number 11 lies not in size or opulence but in its spatial intelligence — in how the house modulates light, air, and movement. Every threshold in the house seems to recalibrate the senses. Narrow corridors open into bright courtyards; low ceilings release into double-height voids. Light filters through foliage and latticed timber screens, creating moving patterns on white walls. The architecture leads gently, not with spectacle but with the rhythm of discovery.
Within the house, each room carries traces of its owner’s life. Bawa was a collector of furniture, books, art, and objects that reflected his wide travels and privileged education. Number 11 is not only a self-portrait in architecture but also a diary in objects; Bawa’s rooms are filled with artefacts collected across his life — a map of Ceylon, a door painted by Australian artist and friend Donald Friend; a stone Buddha from Anuradhapura; brass oil lamps from Jaffna; woven textiles by his close friend and collaborator Barbara Sansoni. This eclecticism reflects Bawa’s hybrid identity — European in education, Sri Lankan in sensibility. His interiors capture the condition of a generation caught between empire and independence, between the aspirations of Western modernism and the rediscovery of indigenous beauty. For all its serenity, Number 11 also reflects this duality. It is the home of a man deeply embedded in class privilege, yet enamoured with the vernacular environment. Its courtyards and latticework recall the spatial intelligence of traditional Sri Lankan homes, while its restraint and geometry speak to a modernist discipline learned abroad.
Today, Geoffrey Bawa’s influence extends across the tropics. Architects in India, Southeast Asia, and beyond have adapted his principles: sensitivity to site, honesty of materials, seamless integration of landscape and building. Bawa’s architecture hinted at a sensibility that sought equilibrium, blending a sense of being in the world with a sense of rootedness. The House at Number 11 is the embodiment of this sentiment.
Following Bawa’s death in 2003, the house was entrusted to the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, which maintains it today as both a museum and guest residence. Visitors can book a guided tour, tracing the architect’s footsteps through courtyards and stairways, or stay overnight in one of the guest suites.
As Colombo grows denser and louder, Number 11 endures as a sanctuary of light, shadows and calm. It stands as testament to the fact that modernity need not mean separation from tradition or nature but can, with sensibility, invite a dialogue between all three.
In the end, Geoffrey Bawa’s contribution was not simply an aesthetic style but a sensibility — a way of seeing the world as layered, interdependent, enmeshed. Number 11 still expresses that vision, quietly and thoughtfully and eloquently.
Note: these photos were taken with the kind permission of the Bawa Trust. While I was not permitted to photograph certain areas of Bawa’s private residence while visiting Number 11, I would encourage anyone interested in this beautiful home to visit the Bawa Trust’s website and explore more of Number 11 here.
