Galle taught me proportion

I was born in Galle and raised there, in a family of five, and I went to school at Richmond College. For most of that time I had no idea the place was teaching me anything. It was just where I lived.

Galle is a fort town. Thick walls, lime-washed and patched, streets narrow enough to stay shaded most of the day, and the sea at the end of nearly every one of them. Nothing there is decorated much. The buildings are the shape they are because of heat, rain and light, and the result is that almost everything is in proportion without trying to be.

That is the part that stayed with me. Not a style — I have never wanted to recreate a colonial verandah on a screen — but a sense of what the right size is. How much space something needs around it. When a thing is already finished and you should stop.

I moved to Colombo to widen the work. The house in Galle is still there, and I still go back, and I notice every time that I relax about ten minutes after I arrive. Some of that is family. Some of it, I am fairly sure, is the walls being the right height.

People ask where a design sensibility comes from and expect an answer about school, or a particular designer, or a book. Mine is a town I did not choose and did not think about until I left it.