The Best Hotels and Resorts in Asia: The Gold List 2024

"The late, great architect Geoffrey Bawa’s jungle home is reveling in a glossy new dawn. While this otherworldly estate on Sri Lanka’s southwest coast remains packed to the rafters with history, it’s now embracing modern comforts thanks to the home-grown Teardrop Hotels collection (also behind the Fort Bazaar in Galle Fort), which manages the property with the Geoffrey Bawa Trust. The meticulous work of the father of tropical modernism shines from every corner, with almost everything as he left it. Bawa spent 50 years curating this wonderland, originally an abandoned rubber plantation, creating his inside-outside spaces and furnishing them with Burgher antiques and objets from his travels. The jewel in the crown is the show-stopping garden, with emerald rice paddies alongside butterfly-shaped ponds and moss-covered Ming pots on manicured lawns. Spread across the house and garden, the 10 spacious bedrooms are unique and sublime: one a glass-walled pavilion framed by trees, another a former cowshed turned gallery. Teardrop’s Midas touch extends to the kitchen, marrying Sri Lankan plates with international dishes made from local produce: egg hoppers for breakfast, grilled fish for lunch and coconut and mustard fish curry for dinner. There’s a breezy veranda restaurant, but Bawa’s preferred lunch spot was under a jackfruit tree, with a salvaged temple bell dangling above. After opening batik artist Ena de Silva’s three-bedroom villa (another Bawa triumph) on the edge of the estate, the Geoffrey Bawa Trust has added a hilltop pool and unsealed the architect’s own bedroom, perhaps the biggest treat of all. From $387. —Harriet Compston" - CNT Editors