Sri Lanka's highly recommended hotel

"Lake on the left, Indian Ocean on the right" - this describes the unique location of Cinnamon Bentota Beach. This is one of the later works of Geoffrey Bawa, the father of Asian architecture. The hotel is located on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka in Bentota, next to Galle Rd, and is about a 1.5-hour drive from Colombo International Airport. Cinnamon Bentota Beach was my favorite hotel on this Bawa-seeking trip, embodying his ultimate exploration of "architecture as nature." Although the hotel was renovated and reopened in 2019, its soul is rooted in Bawa's design manuscripts from the 1970s - a turning point when he broke away from the shackles of colonial style and embraced local culture. It's hard to imagine that this design is more than 50 years old when you check in. Bawa once said, "True luxury is letting the wind, light, and water flow freely." Here, he used batik ceilings to replicate Sri Lankan traditional crafts, blurred the boundaries between indoor and outdoor with open corridors, and even synchronized the pool with the lagoon level to achieve the spectacle of "architecture breathing with the tide." I highly recommend booking a lagoon canoe tour. The hotel staff will take you to find the original mangrove forest in Bawa's design manuscripts and look for the wild animals that live there. It's so romantic to drift on the lake and slowly pass through the mangrove forest! Good architecture is never noisy; it just makes nature more beautiful!