hedonists and healers travel to the same places, says this hotel guru

This is Sri Lanka’s first environmentally sustainable hotel, and comes with just 12 villas that overlook Lake Koggala. The open air dining area serves up multi-course meals featuring all local and sustainable ingredients – from red millet to hoppers and flowers adorn most dishes. There is an infinity edged pool that ois framed by a sole tall palm tree. Nature reigns here, you’re likely to pass lizards and birds on the walk between villas. A former cinnamon plantation, at it’s heart sits a water tower at the highest part of the land, which has been clad in cinnamon bark. It looks like a project from TV show Grand Designs. From here you can stand and survey the scene – forest and water clads the topography. 

Arrive by dhoni and, as you float across Lake Koggala, it won’t be until the last minute that you’ll spy the hotel. Built around a natural plateau that wears a banyan tree as its crown, the hotel’s green roofs and cinnamon cladding keeps the suites hidden amid the abundance of foliage. The natural spiral of the landscape echoes the Fibonacci sequence, which in turn inspired Tri’s intriguing layout. The Main House is the open-air jack-wood lounge with cushion-filled cubbies and sunloungers for sunbathing and meditating by a 21-metre infinity pool. Suites are all spaced out along the edge of the water – three-quarters of the land is surrounded by Lake Koggala – and inside, the stylish spacious bedrooms have floaty Tallentire House curtains that deliberately do little to come between you and the light reflecting off the lake. Three elevated suites are housed within the water tower, and the remaining eight villas are dotted down a spiral path, offering sunrise and sunset views, private gardens and terraces or plunge pools. Wake to exotic birdsong bright and early, and from your private balcony you can admire dawn’s pastel colours on the glass-like water without anyone else in sight… and if that’s not meditative enough, get ready to stretch yourself: owner Rob Drummond’s wife is renowned yogi Lara Baumann. Tri’s yoga shala is a suitably special setting to practice her Quantum Yoga, and the calendar includes visits from natural-health practitioners and therapists from around the world. No matter how active you fancy being, between the spectacular setting and the healthy six-course feasts, you’ll leave feeling entirely indulged and edified.

Koggala Lake is dark glass. Pre-dawn, the jungle on the far shore is smudgy with steam, but in the mirror-lake, each frond is distinctly drawn. The sun rises, the image inverts. It's important to catch the precise moment when the lake gives the day back its edges. It helps that I can practise this ritual from my bed at the just-opened Tri sanctuary in Sri Lanka's deep south, though I didn't come here for enlightenment. I first came to this island as a student, for the beach parties, and have come back again and again for the sense-drenching beauty of its interior. Spiritual retreats, dripping incense and earnestness bring me out in hives. But Tri, 20 minutes from the boho buzz of Galle, is my kind of retreat: a place where sybarites and soul seekers can shake down together. Its British owner, Rob Drummond, has planted deep roots in his adopted community. A photographer and dedicated yogi, he has been based in Asia since 2000 and for nine years lived in an exquisitely restored Dutch colonial house in Galle. Steeped in local culture and fluent in Sinhalese, Drummond was energetic in the post-tsunami regeneration of the south.

When Douglas, his local fixer and right-hand man at Tri - someone with a smile so expressive you're halfway through lunch before you realise he's not speaking English - invites me to his home for a meal, there is no hint of a laid-on 'experience'. It is a genuine case of 'any friend of Rob's…' And Rob treads lightly on the land he loves. No trees were harmed in the making of Tri. Eleven rooms and an elliptical water tower are stealthed into the shoreline with cinnamon-branch cladding, a by-product of the spice industry, and green roofs are planted with lemongrass. Working with A00, a Shanghai-based sustainable design firm, Drummond devised a ground plan that respects the naturally occurring mathematical ratio seen, for example, in conch shells. Spooling out from an ancient banyan on the promontory's highest point, the whole development describes an elegant Fibonacci spiral.

'I wouldn't call it a concept. It's just what the land offered up,' says Drummond. 'I'm not really a hotelier; I'm not about maximising profit. But I believe that if you have something special, and do something special with it, then there is an impossible-to-calculate premium. We had an expert come down during construction, and he identified 51 species of bird, 18 of butterfly and 19 of dragonfly. Why would I do anything that's going to harm such a spectacular environment?'

Melding high principles and high design, Tri is at the cutting edge of Asia's new-wave hotel design. Twenty-first-century Sri Lanka has pulled away from the long shadow of colonialism but, in general, the hotel industry has been slow to follow. At Tri, there's not a potted palm or planter's chair to be seen. Architecturally, Drummond was keen to move the story on from the Tropical Modernism of Geoffrey Bawa, who defined resort style on the island with landmark buildings such as the Bentota Beach Hotel (1969) and the astonishing, kilometre-long Heritance Kandalama (1994).

'Ten years ago,' says Drummond, 'there were about eight decent hotels here. Now I can't keep up with them, but not many architects break out too far from Geoffrey's kind of thing, which was great for its time, and actually, a lot are still building in some variant of Dutch colonial. That's lovely, too, but I think that if you have the chance to build your own place, it's slightly sad if all you're going to do is copy something that was done 300 years ago.'

'HEDONISTS AND PARTY ANIMALS, YOGIS AND HEALERS ARE OFTEN DRAWN TO THE SAME SPOT: BEAUTIFUL PLACES WHERE THE SPIRIT COMES ALIVE'

At Tri, billowing muslins and graphic screen-prints from Galle Fort's fabric store Tallentire House keep villas on the soft side of minimalism, while in the outdoor living room, reclaimed jack-wood beams and paintwork rubbed back to a lichen-sheen add warmth and character.

I suspect the hotel's well-developed pleasure principle is driven by Rob's wife and co-owner, Lara Baumann, founder of Quantum Yoga. At five months pregnant, she can slink into the kind of pretzel poses seen only on wall paintings, but she's no hard-liner: 'Are we a hotel or a wellness spa?' she wonders. 'I guess we'll figure that out as we go along. What I've observed from years teaching yoga in places like Goa and Ibiza is that hedonists and party animals, yogis and healers are very often drawn to the same spot: beautiful places where the spirit comes alive. For some that can mean dancing all night, for others it can be sitting in meditation. I hope we'll have people doing both here.'

Healthy eating at Tri, however, has never been less penitential. The inventive menus are laced with local superfoods: kurakkan is a tasty kind of millet (truly) and gotu kola is a clover-like herb set to be the new spirulina. Every dish has at least three ingredients I have never heard of: koppara fish with wahoo (a kind of aromatic bark) sounds like a good time on a plate, and turns out to be exactly that.

Dusk fills the lake like spilled ink. Peacocks, elegant and entitled, scatter lesser birds from their roost, as monitor lizards blunder in the undergrowth like drunk party guests. Each has their place at Tri.