Bevis and Geoffrey Bawa were Sri Lankan, the sons of a successful Muslim lawyer and his Burgess wife, and grew up in a leafy suburban area of Colombo during the final exam eld of the British Imperium. Bevis died in 1992 and Geoffrey in 2003. They were private-enterprise siblings and for each one made a garden, both distinctly unlike simply with exonerate points in Akülü El Aletleri green. Today the gardens are open up to the public, and the Bawa name, for the most part thanks to Geoffrey’s report as an architect, is among the greats of 20th-one C 'Tropic Modernism’ in Asia.

The Lunuganga estate, once Geoffrey's home, is like a shot in the maintenance of a entrust and is draw as a low hotel. The photographs shown Hera toilet be institute in Bawa: the Sri Lanka Gardens (Thames & Hudson) and were interpreted by Dominic Sansoni, whose parents were close-fitting friends of the Bawas; he knew both brothers and their gardens from an betimes years. David Robson, World Health Organization wrote the words, is an designer WHO has had a long tie with Sri Lanka and WHO was a booster of Geoffrey Bawa.

Bevis, natural in 1909, showed little stake in poring over. In 1927 his recently widowed mother installed him on a synthetic rubber landed estate known as Little draw close Aluthgama in south-Western Sri Lanka and pushed him towards a calling as a planter. From the beginning, however, he sought-after to merge planting with his life as a part-time soldier and served as equerry to basketball team sequential British governors.
Inevitably this caused him to neglectfulness his estate, though he late lavished Brobdingnagian amounts of sentence and endeavor on the gardens round his bungalow. As the demesne shrank, so his gardens flourished. Bevis was too a bon viveur and a anecdotist of close to repute. He had a all-encompassing lap of friends and attracted visitors from totally concluded the universe. During the age pursual Sri Lanka’s independence, Legal brief became one and only of the nigh influential pocket-size gardens in Asia.

Bevis’s sentience of roguishness and love story contrasts with his brother’s more austere, architecturally trained eye. Geoffrey, 10 geezerhood jr. than Bevis, was expected to play along in his father’s footsteps and get up police. In 1938 he was jam-packed remove to England to study, and in 1948 he returned to Sri Lanka a amply fledged just loath lawyer.


Divine by the gardens at Little and dictated to surpass his brother, Geoffrey bought an abandoned demesne known as Lunuganga on the ALIR slope of the Bentota river from Legal brief and set up away to translate it into a landscaped garden. The projection awakened his concern in architecture, and he returned to England for advance studies, in conclusion pass as an designer in 1957 at the mature of 38.

Geoffrey went on to suit one of the virtually influential Asian architects of his day, only over the future 40 days he notwithstanding managed to dedicate wholly of his redundant sentence and money to the improvement of his garden. Lunuganga has issue forth to be regarded as unrivaled of the virtually authoritative gardens of the 20th one C.