Helga's Folly Hotel - Sri Lanka

Unlikely meetings seem to be something of a theme at Helga’s Folly. Apart from East and West, glancing through the Visitors’ Book I found:

“Alice in Wonderland meets Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Brideshead Revisited meets Priscilla Queen of the Desert? I feel like I’m in a Ken Russell film – about the life of Marlene Dietrich starring Marianne Faithful!”

“An eccentric collision between Fawlty Towers and Absolutely ...
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I was reading the Visitors’ Book as I took tea on the terrace. The sultry tones of Marlene Dietrich’s singing were indeed oozing out through the French windows from the salon behind me at that very moment. Before me, beyond the lush and fragrant gardens, the hillside fell away to reveal, a mile ... more

Unlikely meetings seem to be something of a theme at Helga’s Folly. Apart from East and West, glancing through the Visitors’ Book I found:

“Alice in Wonderland meets Ella Fitzgerald.”

“Brideshead Revisited meets Priscilla Queen of the Desert? I feel like I’m in a Ken Russell film – about the life of Marlene Dietrich starring Marianne Faithful!”

“An eccentric collision between Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous.”

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I was reading the Visitors’ Book as I took tea on the terrace. The sultry tones of Marlene Dietrich’s singing were indeed oozing out through the French windows from the salon behind me at that very moment. Before me, beyond the lush and fragrant gardens, the hillside fell away to reveal, a mile or so distant, the Temple of the Tooth perched beside the lake in the ancient city of Kandy.

Up on the hill, the noise from the city was barely audible, just a subdued hubbub as background to the chatter of monkeys and the calls of birds. Similarly, the scents of jasmine and frangipani guard the garden against any trespassing traffic fumes.

Only the Fawlty Towers reference seemed out of place. The welcome had been warm, the service beyond reproach. The lad who carried our cases to our room even refused a tip – the only time this happened during our visit to Sri Lanka.

Tea was poured for us from an ornate silver pot on a hinged stand. The ginger biscuits were homemade – crisp and piquant with authentic spice. Tasting them, I made a mental note never to touch Ginger Nuts again.

Hold on, you may be thinking. Alice in Wonderland? Ken Russell? Priscilla Queen of the Desert? Where do they come in?

Well, now we’ve finished our tea, let’s take a look at the hotel.

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As we turn to face it from the garden, we see that Helga’s Folly hugs the hillside, three interconnected buildings of indeterminate age and hybrid architectural style. Probably, they date from the early part of the last century, but the exterior decoration dates from some entirely different period, or none.

The outside walls are all painted deep crimson. Many of the upper rooms open up onto balconies, which are rimmed with metal railings, also crimson, but hubbed with a life-size motif of monkeys that is picked out in bright scarlet for contrast.

Walking in through the French windows we reach the salon – I do not believe there is an entirely apposite English word for a reception room of this particular character. Here the walls are a lime yellow, but you can see little of them, so crowded are they with pictures, mirrors, family photos and framed maps and documents. Above, the ceiling is an elaborate mosaic of panels and paintings, from which, rather incongruously, red baubles like Christmas tree decorations dangle down.

The floor-space is crammed with furniture – wide ottomans strewn with brocaded cushions, clocks and cabinets, all kinds of ornaments and bric-a-brac, most dating from between the two world wars. Tall candelabra are so encrusted with wax that it might have accumulated over the same timespan. No one who knows Helga’s Folly would be surprised if it had.

Something by Cole Porter has taken over from Marlene, and appears to emanate from a hand-wound phonograph with an enormous curling megaphone for a speaker. Since the strains are continuous, and no one comes to wind the handle or change the record, this is presumably an illusion, although I would not be entirely surprised if the music were piped through from another room in which a similar machine was wound by hand, rather than from a modern electronic source.

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More from the Visitors’ Book:

“The décor is amazing – dreams fused with nightmares at the charmingly frayed edge.”

“Most of all I love the shagadelic design!”

“Reminds me of the Munsters.”

“Good taste is knowing when to stop. Praise the Lord, Helga passed that point long ago. May the eye never rest.”

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Ah, Helga; of course, you want to know about Helga.

Later on our first afternoon, my wife and I are out by the swimming-pool – which we have to ourselves, kept company only by elfin white statues inlaid with shards of mirror – when Helga’s husband happens by, walking the Dalmatians in the grounds.

We do not realise at first that he is her husband. This emerges by inference as we chat – though whether he is the third or fourth we are never quite clear. Perhaps he himself does not know. In faultless, slightly upper-crusty English, he tells us that they spend much of their time in England, at a place in the Cotswolds, but that the Folly is indeed Helga’s family home, inherited about a dozen years before, and remodelled in her own idiosyncratic style.

Helga de Silva Blow Perera’s style encompasses nostalgia for the soirées and cocktail parties she knew during her father’s career as a Sri Lankan diplomat and sometime Ambassador in Paris with an outré taste in surreal art and gaudy kitsch. She is not a lady given by temperament to restraint or compromise, and no holds are barred.

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Helga is equally uncompromising when it comes to the business side of the hotel. She does not accept coach parties nor block bookings from tour operators – refusals that must cost her dear. She appears to have fallen out with Sri Lanka’s influential fraternity of drivers and guides; at most tourist hotels they are offered cheap or even free accommodation if they bring lucrative foreign visitors to stay, but not it seems at Helga’s Folly, something which is unlikely to induce them to speak well of it. Our own driver, Jaya, makes a point of regretting that he will not be able to stay at the same hotel, but is too professional to criticise the policy.

Perhaps as a result, the hotel is sparsely occupied – just a dozen or so guests for the forty rooms on the two nights we are there. Helga shrugs off this low level of custom. She has been quoted as saying: “I call it an anti-hotel. I don’t like it full. It spoils the family feeling.”

As we make our way down to dinner past the shocking-pink, yellow and blue murals (my own take on the wall-paintings is that Dr Seuss must have been attempting to illustrate The Monkey King in the style of Salvador Dali) I wonder what sort of family’s feeling she is attempting not to spoil.

Conversing with her over a pre-dinner house cocktail in the candle-lit salon provides little insight. She is elegant and poised, her bolt-upright posture perhaps a credit to some finishing-school. Small talk flows from her easily, in cut-glass British tones – similarly, one suspects them of being honed at Roedean or Cheltenham Ladies College – but it is only small talk, nothing truly personal. Perhaps she finds self-expression enough in her hotel.

I cannot pretend that I took to her greatly. Behind her practised grace I sensed a supercilious hauteur. Or perhaps she simply made me feel gauche by comparison and I resented it.

I do admire her though. Not for her aristocratic demeanour, but for her feisty bloody-minded “folly”, her unswerving insistence on arranging her life and her business as she fancies without deferring to any other imperative. Apart from displaying admirable spirit, it has made for a most unusual place to stay.

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Pause for Visitors’ Book excerpts:

“All our senses were bombarded.”

“Excellent food and service should not be forgotten in the avalanche of style and colour.”

“The wildlife was a joy to watch over your excellent meals.”

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We didn’t see much wildlife over dinner apart from the flitting fruit-bats against the twilight sky. In any case, our attention was fully engrossed with the view from the restaurant balcony, with the lights of Kandy reflected in the lake.

The food is as original as the décor. Understated it ain’t. If the menu isn’t exotic enough for you, you are invited to suggest your own. We are happy to follow the kitchen’s lead and have, if I remember rightly, Coconut and Shrimp Soup served in a coconut shell, Fish Pie baked in a pumpkin, some aromatic yellow rice with various side curries and sambals, and a sumptuous pineapple pancake and ice-cream desert.

Service is steady but unhurried, allowing plenty of time to drink in both the wine and the view.

Having eaten out on the balcony also has the benefit of allowing me to omit a description of the restaurant, which is just as well since I must be close to exhausting the possible synonyms for lurid and flamboyant.

After dinner we return to the salon and mingle with the other guests. Helga’s house-party interpretation of hotel-keeping does take a hold.

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Our bedroom is lit by crystal chandeliers and, although large, is dominated by a four-poster draped around with gold-dyed mosquito net.

When we return to it we find that the sheet has not just been turned down but arranged in a swirling pattern, as well as being decorated with blossoms of bougainvillea. Elsewhere in Sri Lanka this kind of fussiness has irritated me, but here it is so in keeping with the ambiance that I cannot resist a chuckle, especially as the composition is discreetly complemented by a hot water bottle peeping out from underneath the sheet.

Like most of the bedrooms, ours has a balcony with view and occasional visiting monkey (best not to leave possessions out). Air conditioning apparatus and plumbing look archaic, but they work.

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Not everyone like the bedrooms though, as the Visitors’ Book attests:

“Faut Folly. Bedrooms full of nightmares.”

“It’s funky, but the bed was like the princess and the pea.”

“Wild, wacky and wonderful service. I’m sure I’ll recover from the bed soon.”

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In a world of increasingly uniform and bland hotels, Helga’s Folly is genuinely different and anything but bland. It is a unique hotchpotch of eclectic styles and influences, thrown together with breath-taking self-confidence and panache. In it, as in Helga herself, East and West do meet, but only in a kind of time-warped No Man's Land, a suspended other-worldly dream.

Helga’s Folly isn’t perfect. It’s more appealing that perfection ever could be, because it has all the imperfections that only true originality can generate. It’s a celebration of individual character, and it deserves to be celebrated in turn. Or visited, at least.

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According to the website (www.helgasfolly.com) basic tariff is US$100 a night for a double room, rising to $110 from November, still under £60 at the current exchange rate. That’s room only – B&B takes it up to $114 and half-board to $142, which seems a bit odd, since, so far as I can work out from my bill we paid less than $28 for the dinners we had there. It would be typical of Helga’s Folly if billing mistakes were made in the customer’s favour. On the other hand, I doubt that you could negotiate a discount as you can with most hotels. Try it by all means, but I suspect it simply wouldn’t be in Helga’s character to compromise.

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Anyway, I’ll let the Visitors’ Book have the last word(s):

“Bizarre – even Peter Pan could have an adventure here. It fascinates me to imagine what you could have done with Disneyland.”

“We’re so relaxed we’re talking family farts!”

“A soothing balm for the soul, a curer of weld-schmerzen.”

“You’ll either love it or hate it. For what it’s worth, I loved it.”

So did I, so did I.

© torr 2004, except for Visitors’ Book quotations.

 

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