Housed in Sri Lanka’s first ever boutique hotel, which opened in the 1970s, The Villa Bentota was relaunched in 2009 to luxurious new standards by Paradise Road’s Mr Udayshanth Fernando. Among Sri Lanka’s most prominent designers, he traded colour for elegance and focused on textiles, weaving hessian and rattan with raw wood and marble for an effect that’s both chic and inviting. The garden, filled with coconut palms, extends to the Indian Ocean, where a dip in its calm waters awaits.