The house he built on that clearing has much in common with the buildings of his younger brother Geoffrey, the award-winning architect who designed Sri Lanka's remarkable Houses of Parliament. The two men display great similarities of taste, although their approach to architecture is entirely different: Geoffrey is formal, classic, a schooled architect whose flights of fancy are always carefully navigated, while Bevis is by contrast an unabashed romantic. Brief is above all a playground of the senses, full of inviting nooks, alcoves, bowers and cloisters. Everywhere in the house and garden, one is encouraged by the surroundings to lie back, stretch out, even doff one's clothing.

The garden is full of other paradoxes and illusions. Its actual area is not great, and it is impossible to get lost in it, yet some of the most beautiful spots - the hilltop lookout with its lone aralia, for example - are extremely difficult to find, even if one has already stumbled upon them once by accident. Walking along the perimeter path, one comes to a patch of greensward with a round pond set in the middle. Mounting the hill to the right is an enormous flight of stone steps. It is perhaps the grandest-looking thing in the garden, and you would expect it to be equally prominent from above. In fact, it is nearly invisible. One eventually finds it running downhill between two unremarkable clumps of bamboo, themselves part of a separate planting designed to lead the eye in quite another, direction, and effectively concealing the imposing balustrade.

The house itself is less illusive; no trompe l'oeil here. The main gates open on to a large, bamboo-hedged circle which serves as a car park. The front] door is set in this hedge, with the house behind it quite invisible; even the roof of the entryway is concealed by a magnificent white bougainvillea. Ring the bell in its maniacally Gothic, wrought-iron bracket, and a servant will appear to conduct you to the centre of Bevis Bawa's paradise.

Within the house there is no sign of ostentation. The floors are bare cement, the walls and ceilings plain and without ornament. There is an almost complete absence of softness and plush; this is quite clearly the home of a confirmed bachelor. Yet comfort is there, and above all beauty, which is of course the greatest luxury of all. The house is full of art. Much of it is Bevis's own work. Of these, the sculptures of beautifully proportioned male nudes that dot the house and garden are perhaps the most remarkable. Of the other artists whose work is represented, that of the Australian painter/sculptor Donald Friend gets the biggest showing.

Friend, "passing through" Sri Lanka in the '60s, dropped in at Brief for a short visit and ended up staying five and a half years. As mementos of his friendship with Bevis, he strewed Brief with art: a superb mural which thtmatically represents Sri Lanka as the favoured isle of the Hindu god Skanda adorns the reception room, a superb: aluminium sculpture of Aphrodite rising, hides in a niche in the corridor. terra-cotta tabletops engraved with the artist's designs are everywhere. Sri Lankan artists are well represented, too along with artworks of less recent origin: an old stone Ganesh in the reception room, a collection of Hindu temple bronzes in the main drawing room.  Continued...

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