THE FINAL commission that Bawa received before his death in 2003, aged 83, was for the aptly named The Last House, a five-room guest house near Tangalle on Sri Lanka’s south coast. Situated right on the beach, it’s all butter yellow and aqua, with bougainvillea draped walls and doorways, and French shutters framing stunning vistas, from the frangipani tree and swimming pool where tiny birds swoop and drink to the palm-fringed lawn where dinner is served among fairy lights. You can hear the waves as you drift off to sleep in your four-poster bed, surrounded by romantic white gauze that serves as a utilitarian mosquito net. If I had a weekend retreat, I wouldn’t mind it being a bit like this.

In a stroke of luck, owner Tim Jacobson was there when we visited, so I got the chance to ask him about its history. He explained that he bought the land in 1996 and commissioned Bawa to design this small hotel on it the following year. The civil war was raging in the north but Jacobson, a British financier living in Hong Kong at the time, was not put off. “Of course there were risks,” he says. “When we were building, one guy said to me: ‘Why are you doing this? We’re all trying to leave.’ “But once he got from Colombo to Tangalle, he says, all that became a distant thing, “and I knew tourism would pick up when the war ended.” (He was right; the war ended in 2009 and tourism did pick up. In between, there was the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which severely dam aged The Last House, along with decimating 29 28 DREAM DESTINATIONS much of the Sri Lankan coast. The property reopened in 2006.)

Jacobson travelled to Lunuganga to meet with Bawa and his number two, Channa Daswatte, now chair of the Geoffrey Bawa and Lunuganga Trusts, to work on the designs.

“We would sit outside, look over these big plans,” he says. “I hadn’t built a property before, so it was a novel and rewarding experience.” Above and right: Bawa’s final commission before his death at 83 was for The Last House, a five-bedroom guest house on the country’s south coast. He feels lucky to have met them, particularly given Bawa had a stroke in 1998, after which Daswatte took over much of the work executing the designs. Jacobson went on to build and/or manage numerous hotels around Sri Lanka under his Manor House Concepts group, but The Last House, signifying his personal pivot away from finance and into tourism, remains a favorite. “The brief was open spaces, using as little glass as possible, with a flow through of air,” he says over coffee on the patio. “The cross breezes are terrific and a lot of the bedrooms open both ends. The idea was that fresh air would act as a natural cooling agent. We only put air-conditioning in four or so years ago, because it was getting hotter at certain times of the year.”

When Jacobson began the project, his youngest son was a baby. He’s now all grown up. The Last House is part-family property, part-boutique hotel, and what he loves the most, he says, is hearing from guests. “This will sound cheesy, but I’ll say it anyway, with my hotelier hat on,” he says. “I take a lot of pleasure from the pleasure people get from not just a comfortable and satisfactory stay but all the things that go into the design and sense of place.” For a lot of that, we can thank Geoffrey Bawa.