The Hill Club

The Hill Club is one of the most distinctive survivors of British colonial Sri Lanka. It was founded in 1876 by three planters — W. H. Walker, J. Wickwar and H. Saunders — as a private club for the foreign coffee, cinchona and tea planters who had settled Nuwara Eliya, and it began modestly, with little more than a billiard room and a bar. Edward Rosling became its first formally elected president in 1899. The club's current two-storey grey stone building, on a 17-acre estate on Grand Hotel Road next to the Nuwara Eliya Golf Club and the President's official residence, was built in the 1930s by the British architectural firm Edwards, Reid and Begg, replacing the club's earlier, smaller premises.

For nearly a century, membership was restricted to foreign planters, and the club did not admit women or Sri Lankan nationals until 1967 — a policy that makes The Hill Club as much a piece of social history as an architectural one. Today it has roughly 950 members, both Sri Lankan and foreign, and non-members can stay as hotel guests, effectively getting a working member's-eye view of a club that has changed remarkably little.

Inside, the building keeps its colonial-club atmosphere fully intact: wooden staircases, high roofs, hardwood floors, open fireplaces lit against the hill-country chill, and antique furniture and trophies collected over close to a century and a half. The 44 guest rooms sit alongside a dining room, bars, a reading room, a ladies' lounge, a games room and four tennis courts, all run with the formality of an old-fashioned English club rather than a resort.

Some of the club's old-fashioned formality is still enforced rather than simply displayed. A jacket-and-tie dress code for gentlemen, and equivalent evening wear for ladies, applies in the main dining room after 7pm, a rule the club has kept in place as a matter of tradition; guests without their own jacket and tie can borrow one from the club free of charge, and a separate, genuinely casual restaurant and bar is available for anyone who would rather skip the formality altogether. It is a small but telling detail: few hotels anywhere still enforce, rather than merely reference, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old dress code.

What sets The Hill Club apart from every other hotel in Nuwara Eliya is that it never stopped being a club. Guests are staying inside a functioning institution with a century and a half of continuous membership history, built and expanded by the same planting families whose tea estates still cover the surrounding hills, rather than in a hotel designed to recall that era after the fact.

Your transfer to The Hill Club

The nearest hotel on this site is Araliya Green City in Grand Hotel Road, a few minutes on foot.