St Mark’s Church

Decent quality 3 star hotel on negombo seafront. Nice garden facing the beach and great views of sunsets. Guests were a mixed crowd of locals and foreign tourists. Check in process was slow and inefficient. Staff seemed to struggle to process a group booking ahead of us and told us to wait. This took more than half hour. The older lady who showed us to our room incorrectly told us that there was no room service. Her younger male colleague confirmed there was room service and said he was frustrated with this older ladies capability to do her job. We struggled on our first night as the air con didn't work. The maintenance staff struggled to fix the issue and we had to be moved. Many of the sockets were not to the current Sri Lankan /UK standard. In other words they were the 3 round pin sockets.. Buffet on the saturday was very good and wide ranging. Sunday was a lot worse, we think it may have been cos there were less guests All in all a mixed bag but the staff are reasonably friendly, garden is nice. Rooms need updating but compared to some so called 4 star rival hotels i would say this place is decent value for money.

The house was wonderful to stay in and visit. The only comment and this is a more philosophical one - what is the balance between originality and being fresh for a guest to inhabit? I think this needs careful thinking through. The house is wonderfu and its a great place to stay if you love Bawa architecture, but some areas could do with cleaning more thoroughly or replacing. There is no benefit in a knackered old japanese paper lantern when an identical one can be bought online cheaply, or an old blanket that has seen better days or a musty wardrobe - all these can be fixed without undermining an important piece of architecture. Beyond that, the house is wonderful, the staff are great and the house is in a great location in Colombo and I would recommend it as a place to visit if you are interested in Bawa's architecture.