De Soysa House

De Soysa House is a small white tower house in central Colombo, designed by Geoffrey Bawa for the artist Chloe de Soysa and her husband Cecil. Begun in 1985 and finished in 1991, it stands among old shade trees on Dharmapala Mawatha, a short walk south of Beira Lake. It is one of the last houses Bawa built in the city, and one of the plainest: a square of white plaster, black-framed windows and a roof given over to a garden. Architects visit it for that restraint, and for a detail that changed his later work, because this is where Bawa first experimented with steel.

De Soysa House at a Glance

A House Built for Downsizing

By the mid-1980s the de Soysas found their family home too large: their children had grown up and left. Rather than move away, they divided the long, narrow family plot between Dharmapala Mawatha and Boyd Place into smaller lots for themselves and their daughters, and asked Bawa, an old friend and a regular visitor to the house, to design something smaller next door. Work stopped for a time when Cecil died unexpectedly during the project, and the house was completed in 1991 for Chloe.

The friendship shows in the brief. Bawa planned the rooms around furniture Chloe already owned, so the house was shaped to fit the life that was moving into it rather than the other way round. Her daughter Sharya remembers him arriving with bundles of peacock feathers from Lunuganga, his country garden at Bentota, because she loved them.

The Tower House Design

The house is a square of about 14.5 metres a side, set on a north-south line in the southern half of the plot, about 30 metres back from the road. Each level is more open than the one below it:

• Ground floor: half enclosed and half a roofed, open space that leads out to a patio under the trees.
• First floor: fully enclosed, with the main living rooms: study, dining area, living room, bedroom and bathroom.
• Second floor: mostly an open, sunlit terrace, with a two-storey tower rising from one corner to hold private rooms.
• Top level: a roof garden, partly shaded by a white timber pergola and otherwise open to the sky.

A staircase lined with paintings by artists of the '43 Group, the circle that brought modern art to Sri Lanka in the 1940s, carries you from the ground floor up through the house. The tower house was a type Bawa returned to in his later years, and here it is pared right back: no carved columns, no tiled roofs, none of the layered verandas of his earlier Colombo houses.

Bawa's First Experiment with Steel

The large windows that light the main rooms are framed in steel and slim black aluminium, and the Geoffrey Bawa Trust describes this house as Bawa's first experiment with steel. He was pleased with the result and went on to use steel on a far larger scale at the Kandalama hotel, built between 1991 and 1994 against a rock face above Kandalama Reservoir. Seen side by side, the two buildings share an idea: a simple, almost severe structure that lets planting do the decorating.

The Garden

Most of the plot is old garden, and the house was placed to keep its mature trees. Chloe de Soysa planted the terraces and the roof herself, and climbing plants now soften the white walls and wrap the pergola posts. Her daughter has said the green spaces meant she never felt shut in, even during the COVID lockdowns. In a dense part of the city, it is a reminder of what Bawa did best: making a small house feel open to light, air and plants.

Can You Visit De Soysa House?

De Soysa House is a private family home and is not open for casual visits. It has been opened during Open House Colombo, the annual event the Geoffrey Bawa Trust has run since 2022, which in 2024 took "Gardens and Green Spaces" as its theme and opened the house on 23 March. If you are in Colombo when an Open House weekend is announced, check the Trust's programme for registration.

The house sits opposite Habib Bank on Dharmapala Mawatha, just past the turn into Alwis Place, at the edge of Kollupitiya. Buses 145, 175 and 177 stop right outside; there is no parking. Please respect the residents' privacy and view it only from the street on other days.

Seeing More of Bawa's Colombo

Bawa's own town house, Number 11, is open for guided visits, and you can book entrance tickets to the Bawa House in advance. His Seema Malaka pavilion floats on Beira Lake a few minutes from De Soysa House, beside Gangaramaya Temple. For a wider circuit, our Bawa tours link his Colombo buildings with Lunuganga and his brother Bevis Bawa's Brief Garden near Bentota.

To understand the older city around these buildings, the Colombo City Walk with a Local takes you through Colombo Fort and Pettah with a licensed guide, ending on Galle Face Green.

Further Reading

David Robson's Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works (Thames & Hudson, 2002) and his later In Search of Bawa both describe the house, the second under the name Chloe de Soysa House. The Geoffrey Bawa Trust's Open House Colombo 2024 notes include recollections from the family.