Hotel Suisse

Hotel Suisse occupies a building on Sangaraja Mawatha with a history that runs back to the 17th century, when the site held the private residence of the Chief Minister of the Royal Granary. Following the Kandyan uprising of 1817–18, British forces took the property and renamed it Haramby House; by 1846 it was home to George Wall, a manager of the Ceylon Plantation Company and a significant figure in the island's early tea industry, a period that connects the building directly to the founding years of Ceylon's plantation economy. In the early 1880s the building housed the Kandy Club, an exclusive colonial-era social club, before the club relocated in 1887.

In 1924, Jeanne Louisa Burdayron, a Swiss national, acquired the property and began operating it as a guest house — the change of use that eventually gave the hotel its present name. During the Second World War, the building was requisitioned and served as the headquarters of the South East Asia Command under Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, a role that briefly made this Kandy address a centre of Allied wartime planning for the entire region, at a time when Kandy itself served as the Allied headquarters for the South East Asian theatre. The government took over the building in 1951 for use as administrative offices before it returned to life as a hotel.

Today Hotel Suisse runs as a four-star heritage property with 88 rooms, operated by the state-owned Ceylon Hotels Corporation, and markets itself around views over Kandy Lake, giving guests a direct line to the water from a building that predates the modern town growing up around it. The hotel also keeps a spa on site, a modern addition folded into a building whose walls have otherwise seen Kandyan officials, British colonists, a Swiss guest-house proprietor and an Allied wartime command post pass through in turn.

The building's age and layered ownership — Kandyan-era residence, British colonial house, gentlemen's club, Swiss-run guest house, wartime military headquarters, government offices, and finally hotel again — set it apart from Kandy's newer hotels in a way no amount of contemporary design can replicate. Few buildings in Kandy have passed through quite so many distinct institutional lives while remaining, in some form, continuously in use.

For guests interested in Kandy's colonial and wartime history as much as a comfortable room, Hotel Suisse offers a building that was genuinely present for most of it, rather than a modern property built to evoke a past it never actually had.

Your transfer to Hotel Suisse

The nearest hotel on this site is Radisson Hotel Kandy in Saranankara Road, a few minutes on foot.