Ismeth Raheem, 2023, Central Courtyard of Cinnamon Lodge, Raheem Collection, Colombo

One evening, early in 1971, my wife and I returned home to our bungalow in Colombo’s Charles Place to find a sheet of paper pinned to the front door. It was a wood-block print of a highly stylised owl measuring about 30 by 45 centimetres, and it carried a message in elegant script across one corner stating, “Sorry, can’t make it on Pre-Poya evening. Delini and Ismeth”. After more than fifty years, it still hangs on our wall in Brighton and serves as a reminder of a time before the smartphone had been invented, when none of us even had telephones. 

I met Ismeth in 1969, when he had recently returned from Denmark to work in Edwards, Reid and Begg alongside Geoffrey Bawa and the Danish architect Ulrik Plesner. During this period, he played a key role in a number of important projects, including the YWCA building in Colombo’s Rotunda Gardens, the Agrarian Research and Training Institute in Wijerama Mawatha and the Bentota Beach and Serendib hotels. Bawa, recognising his talent as an artist, commissioned Ismeth to produce artworks in both hotels. Sadly, few of them have survived, though a number of his murals on the walls of the Serendib Hotel have been periodically traced over by waiters with felt pens and remain in place like ghostly palimpsests. At this time, he also produced the beautiful door of beaten aluminium and gold leaf that graces Bawa’s Colombo townhouse. 

In 1976, Ismeth quit Edwards, Reid and Begg with Pheroze Choksy and set up the partnership Choksy and Raheem. Amongst their early works were a number of private houses and commercial buildings and a hotel in Nuwara Eliya. They also created their own office in a lane off Sir Marcus Fernando Mawatha and behind it, Ismeth built his own town-house using salvaged antique doors and windows. But their most memorable achievement was the design, construction and landscaping of the Habarana Lodge Hotel (now the Cinnamon Lodge) in the heart of Sri Lanka’s Cultural Triangle. 

Habarana Lodge, a large pavilion-style hotel set within a wooded landscape enjoys views across a large reservoir towards the towering Ritigala massif. The hotel was the brainchild of Mark Bostock, the Chairman of John Keells between 1969 - 1986. With a growing involvement in tourism, John Keells had already owned the Bentota Beach Hotel that Geoffrey Bawa had built in 1968. John Keells wanted a hotel within the Cultural Triangle to add to their portfolio and in 1978 acquired a 25-acre site to the southwest of Habarana Village. 

Habarana straddled the crossroads where the A6 road from Kandy to Trincomalee met the A11 road from Anuradhapura to Batticaloa and boasted little more than a run-down rest house and a police station. But it lay at the centre of the so-called Cultural Triangle and was a short drive away from the rock citadel of Sigiriya, the forest monastery of Ritigala and the ruined city of Polonnaruwa. The site was a relatively featureless area of barren scrub, denuded by years of slash-and-burn cultivation and had little to commend it. However, it sloped gently down towards a large reservoir and enjoyed splendid views northwards towards the fabled Ritigala Mountain. 

When Bostock invited Pheroze Choksy and Ismeth Raheem to be his architects, one of Ismeth’s first acts was to persuade Bostock to start an immediate campaign of tree-planting. With help from the Mahaweli minister Gamini Dissanayake, he organised the transplanting of several hundred semi-mature root-balled trees from areas of the Mahaweli that were scheduled to be submerged by new reservoirs. Over the next four years he managed to plant a total of almost two thousand indigenous trees across the site. The hotel was conceived by the architects as a matrix of ninety free standing pavilions arranged in clusters around a central reception and hospitality core. Bungalow pavilions comprised a single suite while those on two storeys contained suites on each floor. A suite consisted of a sitting room and a bedroom with either a covered veranda or a balcony and contained locally produced furnishings designed by the architects. The gleaming white pavilions with their clay-tile roofs were arranged in a loose grid of quadrangular clusters beneath the trees and enjoyed views out across the reservoir towards the Ritigala mountain. The whole complex had a strangely urban feel as if one had stumbled on a lost city within the jungle. 

After quitting the main road, visitors descend a long tree-lined avenue to arrive at an imposing double-height reception loggia. They then cross a tree shaded courtyard to enter the main two storey hospitality building. With a length of some forty-five metres, this contains a restaurant, bars and a first-floor function room. It was designed to be fully open, without doors or glass windows and without air-conditioning. To this end, it deploys an ingenious cross-section with projecting overhangs that keep out monsoon rain and clerestory openings that admit only indirect light and encourage stack ventilation. The restaurant opens onto a long, paved terrace which overlooks an elegant swimming pool and a beautiful tree-lined inlet that was created by damming a small stream. From the centre, visitors disperse along a network of paved walkways that lead out through the trees to the clusters of residential pavilions.

The Lodge has survived the passage of more than forty monsoons and, miraculously, has retained many of its original features. Ismeth has remained involved throughout this time and has been regularly consulted about any changes that were needed. Today, with its unique collection of indigenous trees, the Lodge seems more like an arboretum than a hotel, and is the haunt of all manner and kind of wild-life from butterflies to elephants. At the outset, an estimated forty species of birds visited the site regularly; today that number exceeds one-hundred and-fifty. Following in the footsteps of Bawa, the architects developed a contemporary architecture, which referenced Sri Lanka’s rich history. Their design incorporated details that might be described as Portuguese-Kandyan, but they also sought inspiration from the nearby monastic ruins of Ritigala. At Ritigala, as at the Lodge, the communal buildings formed a core and the individual shelters of the contemplative monks were scattered around in the trees. And in the hotel, most of the buildings are raised on elegant stone plinths, inspired by the raised platforms that support the main buildings of the monastery. These add a sense of grandeur while serving to discourage snakes, protect privacy and improve ventilation. Today, the hotel stands as a fitting memorial to the vision and drive of Mark Bostock, but also to the creative talents of its architects.

The Central Cultural Fund Guide to Ritigala 

By sheer coincidence, as work on the Habarana Lodge Hotel was progressing, Ismeth and I were recruited by our friend Bill McAlpine to help write a guide book to the magic Ritigala mountain and its mysterious monastic ruins. This was one of a number of official guide books that were being produced by the Central Cultural Fund under the aegis of the U.N.E.S.C.O. Cultural Triangle Project, an ambitious undertaking that sought to coordinate efforts to conserve and manage the astonishing plethora of ruins that lay within the triangular area formed by the ruined ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa and the medieval stronghold of Kandy. Bill had recently retired as a head of the British Council in Sri Lanka and was now in his sixties. He was an accomplished writer with a deep interest in Buddhism and would focus on history and mythology while I would concentrate on the ruins and Ismeth would contribute his knowledge of Sri Lanka’s flora and fauna.

The Habarana Lodge Hotel lay only twelve kilometres away from Ritigala and its architecture had been inspired by the ruins of the forest monastery so it made the perfect base for our enterprise. We worked on the book throughout 1982, consulting sources in Colombo and London and paying regular visits to Ritigala.

On one occasion we rose early and set out to climb to the summit of Ritigala Kanda, the highest point of the massif, though we were defeated by the heat and the undergrowth and only managed to reach the Vevel Thenne, a strange sheltered plateau lying about 150 metres below the summit. Bill’s legs at this point had ‘turned to jelly’, but he insisted that we should leave him to get down under his own steam. This he did, though we later had to carry him into the hotel and put him to bed with a large arrack soda.

 Our guide book was eventually published by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in 1983. It took the form of a soft-backed A5 booklet that was uniform with similar guides to Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. The cover was designed by Ismeth and carried an evocative drawing of the main pavement of the monastery in white against a brown background. The text was in four sections: a general historical introduction, followed by descriptions of the mountain, the hermetic caves and the monastic ruins. Bill McAlpine provided the general historical background and was responsible for the overall editing, while Ismeth contributed information about the mountain’s unique flora and fauna and I wrote the section on the ruins. I produced a gallery of black and white photographs and drew detailed maps of the mountain. We were also able to include a folded A3 print of the plan of the ruins that had been made by the archaeological surveyor, D.A.L. Perera in 1893. Our work was carried out pro bono and at our own expense. Although we never received a single word of thanks, our names did at least appear on the final page. The guide was sold at various Cultural Triangle sites, priced at Rs. 37 (equivalent to £1 sterling at the time). Later reprints in English and in Sinhala followed at various intervals, and it is still available today, though without our names and sadly, without the crucial Perera plan.