Building With Memory: How Sustainable Architecture Is Redefining Sri Lanka's Hospitality Landscape
- RMJA
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
A look at how the Wishing Tree Boutique Resort in Beragala Haputale is setting a new benchmark .
Perched on a quiet hill just seven kilometres from Beragala Junction, where the cool highland air carries the scent of tea and mist rolls in over emerald ridges, the Wishing Tree Boutique Resort doesn't announce itself loudly. It settles into its landscape the way a well-worn stone settles into a hillside — as if it has always belonged there.
That sense of belonging isn't accidental. It is the result of a deliberate, values-driven design philosophy shared by two Sri Lankan architectural firms who came together on this project: RAPA Chartered Architects (www.rapaarchitects.com), and RMJA Architects (www.rmja.lk). Their collaboration on the Wishing Tree Resort is quickly becoming one of the most compelling case studies in sustainable hospitality architecture in Sri Lanka today.
The Problem With "New"
Modern hotel construction in Sri Lanka — particularly in scenic hill country and coastal zones — has long followed a familiar template: clear the land, import materials, build fast, and sell a view. The result is an archipelago of structures that look no different from one another and have little connection to the soil, the culture, or the communities around them.
Both RMJA and RAPA have built their practices in deliberate opposition to this model. RAPA and RMJA are an award-winning studios known for contextual, tropical modern design. RMJA, led by a Green Building Council of Sri Lanka-certified associate professional, brings a rigorous commitment to eco-conscious design and material intelligence to every project. Together, their brief for Wishing Tree was simple but profound: build beautifully, build lightly, and build honestly.
Materials With a Past Life
Walk through the Wishing Tree Resort and you'll notice details that most guests feel before they consciously register. A warmth in the rooflines. A texture in the wall panels. A roughness and richness in the timber that no showroom catalogue could replicate. These aren't decorative choices. They are the project's core philosophy made visible.
Reclaimed Clay Roofing Tiles
The roof of the resort draws from one of Sri Lanka's oldest and most familiar building traditions — the hand-pressed clay tile. Rather than sourcing new tiles, the design team tracked down reclaimed tiles salvaged from older buildings. These tiles carry decades of weathering, their patina a record of past monsoons and highland frosts.
Beyond their aesthetic power, reusing clay tiles to construct the walls makes profound environmental sense. Fired clay production is energy-intensive. Every reclaimed tile used is one less that needs to be produced, transported, and installed new. At scale across a ten-room boutique resort, the cumulative reduction in embodied carbon is significant. The result is a roofscape that reads not as retro pastiche, but as a structure genuinely embedded in its cultural and climatic context.
Railway Sleeper Off-Cuts: Waste as Resource
Perhaps the most striking material story at Wishing Tree involves timber — specifically, the off-cuts and edge offal generated during the manufacture of railway sleepers.
Railway sleepers in Sri Lanka are produced from dense, hardwood logs — timber that is exceptionally strong, tightly grained, and already seasoned for outdoor durability. The milling process, however, leaves behind a significant volume of off-cut material: slabs, tapered edges, and irregular sections that are typically discarded or burned.
Ar. Jayawardana and Ar. Ratnayaka sourced these off-cuts and put them to work. Incorporated into structural elements, flooring details, and furniture across the resort, the sleeper timber brings with it not just material quality but a kind of authenticity. Each piece is unique. Each carries the marks of its original purpose. And each represents material that would otherwise have been waste.
Cane-Woven Panels: The Craft of Enclosure
In Sri Lanka, cane and rattan weaving is a living craft tradition — one that has been practiced for generations in villages across the hill country and wet zone. Yet it is also a tradition under pressure, squeezed by cheaper industrial alternatives and a construction industry that rarely makes room for it.
At Wishing Tree, cane-woven panels were used extensively as wall panels, screening, ceilings and decorative elements throughout the resort. The decision was as much social as it was aesthetic. By specifying hand-woven cane panels as a primary design material, the architects created sustained, meaningful work for local craftspeople — weavers whose skills, if not engaged, risk being lost to the next generation.
The panels themselves are extraordinary: responsive to light, visually porous yet spatially defining, and deeply connected to the traditions of the region. They breathe. They move. They belong in a highland resort in a way that a sheet of plywood simply cannot.
Supporting the People of the Place
Sustainable architecture is not only about materials and carbon. It is also about economics, community, and the question of whose livelihoods are supported by the act of building.
At every stage of the Wishing Tree project, RAPA and RMJA made deliberate choices to engage local craftspeople, artisans, and tradespeople from the surrounding region. Masons who know hill-country stone. Carpenters who work with timber in the traditional way. Weavers, finishers, and fabricators whose skills are embedded in the landscape itself.
This is not charity. It is a design decision with long-term economic and cultural consequences. When a project of this scale chooses local craft over imported convenience, it invests in the resilience of a community. It keeps skills alive and in circulation. It ensures that the built environment and the human environment remain connected — that the resort is not an enclave imposed on Beragala, but a place that has genuinely grown from it.
Architecture as Continuity
What Ar. Thilina Ratnayaka of RAPA and Ar. Rajith Jayawardana of RMJA have demonstrated at the Wishing Tree Resort is something the hospitality industry talks about often but achieves rarely: architecture that is truly of its place.
The reclaimed tiles speak of history. The sleeper timber speaks of resourcefulness. The cane panels speak of community. And the mist-laced views of the Haputale highlands — the backdrop against which all of this sits — speak of a landscape worth being careful with.
In an era when "sustainable design" has become a marketing tag applied to almost anything, Wishing Tree is a reminder of what the phrase actually means when architects take it seriously. It means fewer new things made, and more old things honoured. It means choosing a local weaver over a bulk supplier. It means understanding that a building's footprint extends far beyond its foundations — into the economy, the ecology, and the living culture of the place it inhabits.
For guests who arrive at this quiet hilltop near Beragala, the experience is one of effortless tranquillity. What they may not fully realise — though they will certainly feel — is that every beam, every tile, and every woven panel they encounter carries a story. A story of material redeemed, craft supported, and a landscape treated with the care it deserves.
A Blueprint Worth Following
Sri Lanka's tourism sector is at a crossroads. The demand for boutique, experience-driven accommodation is growing. So, too, is the risk of that demand being met with the same careless development that has scarred so many of the island's most beautiful places.
The Wishing Tree model — enabled by the architectural vision of RAPA (www.rapaarchitects.com) and RMJA (www.rmja.lk) — offers a different path. One that treats material reclamation not as a cost-saving measure but as a design value. One that sees local craft not as a compromise but as a competitive advantage. And one that understands sustainability not as a checklist, but as a relationship: between a building and its land, between a business and its community, between the architecture of today and the culture it inherits.
The hills around Beragala have been shaped by centuries of tea cultivation, colonial engineering, and highland living. The Wishing Tree Resort, in its careful, thoughtful way, adds another layer to that story — one that future generations may well look back on as the moment Sri Lankan hospitality architecture grew up.
Interested in sustainable design for your next hospitality or residential project? Reach out to RMJA Architects at www.rmja.lk or RAPA Chartered Architects at www.rapaarchitects.com.
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