Renovation and extension architects in Sri Lanka

On Police Park Avenue we re-planned a house that had been in the same family for more than seventy years, opened up the back to a new garden room, and matched every new line to an old one. We reused timber where we could and kept the new joinery quieter than the original. The family moved back in and the neighbours did not notice anything had changed.

At Weboda we added rather than rebuilt, taking down a few interior walls, enlarging the openings at the rear and re-planning the upper floor so every room looks onto the garden. In Borella a colonial-era two-storey house became a three-storey home with the garden at the centre of the plan, and most of the original walls remained.

Villa 82 was a 1970s bungalow in Colombo 6. We kept as much of the original structure as the new use would allow, added two wings at the front and extended the old verandahs rather than rebuilding them, to make a six-bedroom guest villa. Hirdaramani’s head office was made out of a partially constructed building: we kept the concrete frame we found and turned it into a simple volume with an extremely flexible plan.

We revamped the MAS Intimates Silueta office in the Biyagama FTZ in 2021 and the UNFPA office at Thummulla in 2022, and refurbished the ground floor of the MAS Solution Centre in Battaramulla in 2023. The Bernard Botejue factory at Kolonne kept running through its twelve-month extension and re-skin, and at Athi River in Kenya the project combined a renovation and an extension with a new two-storey factory.