“I tell my friends that I'm now midcentury modern,” the New York –based fashion designer Phillip Lim quips about turning 50. “And like the furniture, hopefully better with age.” Joking aside, Lim, who launched his 3.1 Phillip Lim label in 2005 and now sells his signature clean-lined clothing in shops around the world, saw the landmark birthday as a chance to take stock. “I heard somewhere that, with 50, you get a second dawn. I took that to heart.”
Bell-covered doors lead from the courtyard to the interior of the No. 5 house at Lunuganga
For starters, he sold the Manhattan apartment where he'd lived for 16 years and turned his 1940s bungalow on the North Fork of Long Island into his primary home. But the weekend place needed renovating, which was one of Lim's reasons for booking a trip to Sri Lanka, a destination he'd long dreamed of visiting. “The colors, the flavors, the energy—I always feel creatively inspired by Southeast Asia ,” says Lim. He'd previously traveled throughout Cambodia , Thailand , and Vietnam , “but Sri Lanka was on my bucket list because of Geoffrey Bawa .”
The renowned Sri Lankan architect helped pioneer tropical modernism, a movement that adapted mid-20th-century design principles for the hot, steamy climates of Latin America , West Africa , and Southeast Asia , weaving in local materials and building vernaculars.
“I've loved Bawa's design for ages,” Lim says, “but now that I'm sort of playing architect with my bungalow, I really wanted to see his work in person.” Bawa designed dozens of homes, public spaces like Colombo 's parliament building, and hotels across Sri Lanka, displaying a characteristic sensitivity to the landscape and a tendency to blur the line between indoors and out. When Lim learned that Lunuganga, Bawa's personal estate two hours south of Colombo, was open to overnight guests, he took it as a further sign that it was time to visit.
With only a week in Sri Lanka, Lim built his itinerary around visits to two of Bawa's most important projects: The first was Lunuganga , near the beach town of Bentota, the second was the inland Heritance Kandalama Hotel .
The wood-beamed eastern terrace at Lunuganga
Before Bawa purchased Lununaga's 15-acre estate in 1948, the year Sri Lanka declared independence from Great Britain , it had served as both a cinnamon and a rubber plantation. Bawa spent decades turning the colonial-era structure into his private home and planting a sprawling, mostly endemic garden as a way to rehab the land after centuries of monocropping.
“There's Bawa's main house, where you can sleep where he slept and sit at the desk where he worked,” Lim says, “but also bungalows scattered around the grounds where you can see him experimenting with different architectural styles.” Also on the property is No. 5, the house that Bawa built in Colombo in 1962 for his friend Ena de Silva . In 2009, as a preservation measure, it was dismantled, brick by brick, and reassembled at Lunuganga. For Bawa scholars, this building is major: It marked the architect's move away from a purely Western approach toward a more place-specific one that embraced regional materials. “No. 5 turned colonialism on its side,” Lim says. “It took what's native to Sri Lanka and put it into a modernist context.”
Today guests can visit Lunuganga for a tour and have lunch at its open-air restaurant, but they can also spend the night, as Lim did, in one of the 10 guest spaces. The designer found his four days there to be restorative (lots of reading, sketching, and sunbathing) but also creatively invigorating. “Everywhere I looked, there was something to see,” he says. “Seemingly mundane hallways or staircases were a chance to play with perspective and shape; vistas from windows perfectly framed some feature of the landscape. I couldn't believe how modern everything still looked.”
An original textile by Sri Lankan artist Barbara Sansoni covers a carved love seat in Lunuganga’s lower gallery
After Lunuganga, Lim drove four hours northeast to the interior of the country (with detours to see the wild elephants at Hurulu Eco Park and visit Sigiriya , a fifth-century fortress) to check out one of Bawa's most recognizable buildings, the expansive seven-story, 152-room Heritance Kandalama Hotel built into the side of a cliff. After opening in 1994, it became the first LEED-green-certified hotel in the world; today it is enshrouded in a thick canopy of trees and covered with climbing vines. You can still see Bawa's touch, Lim observes, in its sense of place and relationship to nature.
Lim says that every trip impacts his work: “I always make some creative pivot or adjustment to what I'm designing when I come back from traveling.” But with this one, the changes felt more personal. “Slowing down and being close to nature really affirmed my decision to move full time to the North Fork,” he says. “There are definitely bits of Bawa shining through in the remodel.”
This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here .
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