Sri Lanka opens doors to luxury a decade after civil war
Tourism to island nation has quadrupled in past seven years as businessmen, such as Malik Fernando, create high-end experiences to lure wealthy travellers
This story was written by Nikki Ekstein for Bloomberg Pursuits
In 2004 businessman Malik Fernando bought Castlereagh, a decrepit bungalow in the terraced, emerald hills of Sri Lanka’s sprawling tea country. The structure had no roof.
“It was in absolute shambles,” he recalls.
“There were cattle roaming through the whole house.”
Yet, it had one irresistible asset: “It was what was available,” he says, shrugging and welcoming me to the neat, gingerbread-style mansion on a clear, 80-degrees-Farenheit (26.6-degrees-Celsius) winter day.
That was enough to make it the perfect place for the area’s first luxury hotel.
When Fernando closed 13 years ago on Castlereagh, Sri Lanka’s government was in a ceasefire with a secessionist militia, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and optimism was in the air.
He saw an opportunity to cater to fans of his family’s burgeoning tea farms, who were flocking here from around the world.
It took him a year to update the colonial ruin, named after a long-ago tea picker who lived there, into a parquet-floored paradise with five bedrooms and a fleet of butlers in sarongs servicing a hillside pool. Over the next year, he did the same thing with three more bungalows, giving each a different style, its own restaurant, and rooms facing the tea fields. Then the ceasefire ended.