The Journey Of Building Meda Gedara, The Finest Family Villa in Sri Lanka

We first came to Sri Lanka in 2012 for some Easter sun. My older boys were 4 and 6 at the time, and I wanted to take them on a travelling adventure to experience dusty old trains, Tuk-Tuks, elephants, safari’s, surfing and cinnamon. I wanted to immerse them in another culture so they felt completely removed from our UK lives. We explored the whole country, we met wonderful people, climbed up ancient temples, saw snake charmers and rickety old bicycles, we even swam with turtles!

By the time we arrived on the South Coast, where we were staying with a friend, we had already totally fallen in love with Sri Lanka. The same friend, Seb, suggested that we should go and check out the patch of land he had for sale. It was a bit further along the coast, just past the Southerly most tip of the Island.  At that stage, we explicitly had no intention of buying any land, although many people had told us that it was great value and the country was so beautiful.

However, when we bumped down the track and pulled up at the old bungalow, we listened to the bird song, watched the butterflies flit by, then saw the extraordinary turquoise view of the Indian Ocean. We were all mesmerised and the dream began.

Thinking practically, I knew that we could never have afforded to get beach access in Devon or Cornwall, so Sri Lanka did indeed feel like very good value!

After thinking we would buy the land and sit on it for a long while, shortly after getting back to the UK I was playing with the kids’ LEGO and decided to make a floor plan for the perfect villa I had been searching to rent on our travels. The proportions of the lego board seemed to lend itself perfectly to the proportions of my ideal family beach villa. I found myself lost in flow as I began to visualise the layout. I created the ground floor, then the first floor, and by the time I looked up it was dark and the kids were really hungry!

Initially, it started off as a creative idea to see where I got to with the LEGO board. I thought it was a bit of fun, a pipe dream to keep my creativity whirring – I didn’t really expect to actually turn it into reality. We engaged with members of the team who went on to make it happen, and it became a bit clearer that this could become more than just a LEGO model. I began to take it a bit more seriously and consider that we were actually going to build a little beach house as a family bolt-hole…that’s all it was initially meant to be.
You can hear Fiona talk more about the LEGO build here.

During the design phase, I was living in a dream in a permanent state of flow. I envisioned a beach house for my family based on all the elements we needed to relax and have fun; the communal space we need to play games, the big front bedrooms, the nursery bedroom, also the space we all sometimes want for peace & quiet and contemplation. I wallowed in my imagination until I was satisfied that my architectural designs were classically good-looking as well as really practical.

I worked with a man called David Kenyon, who was born in Cheltenham but based in Sri Lanka. Fortunately, we became great friends immediately. We worked on Skype together for about 10 hours every week as David patiently put everything into CAD and brought my ideas to life. Together, we made millions of little decisions. Strangely, I found the most complicated bits were the doors and windows, because every room is completely different and there are so many different mechanisms and designs; the bedrooms are glazed for AC, some have balcony doors, some are double aspect, the ground floor is wide open so needs securing at night – the variations the doors and windows just seemed to go on forever!

So, for at least a couple of years, I walked around with a tape measure in my pocket, feasting on heights of skirting boards, the drop of pendant lights, the depth of bullnoses, the breadth of banisters and the height of the step risers for the freeform staircase. My state of flow continued.

Our Project Manager, Oliver Francis, was also born in Cheltenham and based in Sri Lanka. He patiently worked with the builders to actually bring our CAD dream to a reality. The builders were a local Sri Lankan company, Southern Construction and Engineering, and all throughout the build they did a tremendously good job. Building methods and regs are so different to here in the UK and thankfully Oliver sheltered us from most of the day to day chaos of building in Sri Lanka.

The water slide was one of the first elements of my initial dream and as it turned out it was made in Salisbury UK, just down the road from my childhood home. I certainly didn’t know that a pool slide could be so technical and require so much engineering. I did wonder what on earth I’d embarked upon when they asked me for the average wind speed at 10 meters above sea level for the past 20 years! Once it was made, we then had to get huge wooden crates made for each of the sections to ship it to Sri Lanka. I don’t think the customs officials had ever seen anything quite like it when it arrived at the docks.

As the architectural design was happening, I was also busy scouring auction sites for suitable furniture. Old colonial furniture in Sri Lanka is expensive, but in the UK much of the big old dark wood furniture isn’t wanted now. So, I sat in auction rooms and picked up huge bits of incredible furniture for next to nothing. I slowly filled up the garage with bits, then the garden shed, then the basement. My husband Jeremy thought I was absolutely nuts, but I had a vision. I would pick up pieces from junk shops, antiques fairs, vintage collections and market stalls.

I also asked several friends to create things for particular spaces: One of my favourite pieces in the villa is an enormous mirror which my friend made for the entrance hall, it’s absolutely spectacular – I was so nervous about it getting broken in transit.

Then, when the villa was nearly ready, we packed it all up, put it in a container and shipped it off to Sri Lanka. Thankfully, it all arrived safely and was unpacked into the villa. That really was one of the most euphoric days of my life and the start of the next phase of this adventure.

It was when the walls went up that we started to appreciate the real scale of the villa. It dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be a little beach house that we could lock-up and go; it was going to need full time staff. We certainly hadn’t considered back then that we would be needing 13 people to run the operation that it quickly grew into. However, I realised that it was going to have to be run as a business, and if it was going to be run as a business, I was going to make it into something very special and unique.

With this dawning of an impending new commercial interest and brand to produce, I set about considering the brand identity. I asked my friend Nicola Kirkman to create the beautiful logo, which brilliantly represents two elephants meeting in the middle. Nic also did the painting on the back of the huge mirror and has subsequently illustrated the recipe cards and menu cards – she’s so talented and always has a great interpretation of my rough briefs.

My husband Jeremy has worked in hospitality for years. He has a meticulous eye for detail and pays fastidious attention to every cell in a spreadsheet; he is the yin to my yang. Where I am broad brush strokes, he is finite detail. He was a hard critic during the design phase. Now, 10 years later, while I do the comparatively easy sales and marketing, Jeremy runs the endlessly complicated Meda Gedara operations with his signature fine tooth comb. Although our working styles aren’t always complimentary, I’m not sure how far the whole project would have gone without his guiding management and operational control.

I knew the build schedule may be ambitiously tight, so we allowed a few months of tidying up before 20 of my family descended for Christmas 2016 to road-test the new villa. Even the day before people arrived, the locally made beds still hadn’t been delivered and the garden was a quagmire – it was down to the wire. Back then in those very early days it was so gloriously homespun, chaos perhaps, and definitely a muddy mess, but we were all together in our own home and that was all that mattered. With 20 of us in residence and with an excitable atmosphere we tested and tried every part of the villa and realised that although the space was magnificent, Meda Gedara was still a long way off being ready to open to the public.

So then ensued a year or so of snagging, refining, tweaking, noticing detail, fluffing and honing the look and feel. I then felt we were ready to get some photos taken and show the world the fledgling MG!

We had a magnificent opening in 2018, but then came the unprecedented pandemic, which decimated tourism around the world. This was followed by a raft of other unexpected political upheavals which made tourism a serious challenge.

However, in 2023, Sri Lanka sprung back into the public awareness and regained its crown as the darling of the tropics. That same year, we were extraordinarily overwhelmed and flattered to be named by The Times in the Top 10 luxury villas in the world. It was beyond humbling for me to be in that list and is testament to every member of our team throughout this project that we have all created a place is loved so much.

The villa now plays host to wonderful families who come to MG safe in the knowledge that our standards will not be compromised and that no stone will be left unturned to look after their needs. Loyal families keep on returning so they can see their children growing up in their favourite home-from-home as we keep raising the bar, improving small details, carrying out little requests so that when they return they will see that we listen to their feedback and keep on improving.

And that’s how MG all came about; how the tiny seed of a dreamy idea was brought to life with incredible team work.