It's a majestic miracle

By Carl Muller

In Kandy, the Maligawa blast claimed a major victim - the Queen's Hotel. Windows were blown in, the doors of the banquet hall twisted in, even the first floor ceiling came down. In the main lobby, fittings were smashed. The convulsion of that blast demanded that Kandy's 'grand old lady' call it a day. Many of the hotel's popular outlets, the Pub Royale, the Pastry Shop, suffered. It had been the intention of the Kandy Hotels Company to refurbish the Queen's. This was surely the time. But it would be a race..... for the hotel would have to be functional for the Perahera. When the decision was taken, the battle lines drawn, all the time there was, was a mere sixty days. But Chairman Kithsiri Wanigasekera had his "miracle men". This is their story. This is also a story of unity and strength.

Young, bold in concept and chockful of imagination. This is a story of three men, and it is so warmly human that it would be ill of me to hold back. Not when one sits amidst a welter of wood and marble. There is the whine of sanders and the scrish of saws, the thunk of mallets and hammers, and one gives ear to the quite biting voice of Anton Jacob who will fold his arms and tell a man, "Do you like this new marble?"

"Oh yes."

"And do you know how much it took to get it all here and lay it?"

The man nods. The conversation so far has been cordiality plus.

Anton takes a deep breath. "Okay, so I'll give you five minutes to get all this sawdust off the floor and see that your men stop treating it like a kitchen floor! By God! I'll have you on your hands and knees licking up every bit of it! Comprende?"

The man pales, scuttles away, and Anton closes one eye. "Just kidding," he grins, "but it works every time. You have to stay on top of everything or else these guys will bury you."

Anton Jacob of Jacob Design Corporation, Mount Lavinia; Anura Lokuhetty of Confifi Engineering; Palitha Konara, the Queen's Finance and Administration Manager....Three men who knocked everything into place with dogged, frantic and unfailing determination. Said Anura, "I didn't want to tell you anything earlier because there was so much to do. But now, with the end in sight, I can talk."

Palitha sat in his office to sign cheques, then rose to walk the corridors, now here, now there, shoving in that much needed oar. He still had a hotel to run and keep functional even if it seemed to all of Kandy that the Queen's was in some state of suspended animation.

Anton whirled around like a comet. He filled a table top with sketches, rough- ups of his ideas - from the moulding of ceiling to banisters, the lighting, drapes, furniture, wood tones, the cobblestoned forecourt, window glasses, where and what he will hang and display. His mind was always doing a sort of hop, step and jump, and suddenly, out of the madness that seemed like some explosion in a hardware shop, there was form and definition and the emerging of a grand design.

Let us go back. There was the bomb blast! When the Tigers targeted the Maligawa, the Queen's suffered. The concussion caused much havoc and it was then that Chairman, Kithsiri Wanigasekera took this quite breathless decision: Close the Queen's!

It had all started much earlier, of course and it was Palitha Konara who was largely instrumental... like when he met Anura at the Perahera last year. Let's also meet him, shall we... Anura Lokuhetty, old Royalist, 20 years a hotelier and Director Operations of the Confifi Group. A young go-getter with confidence that positively oozes. "I began as a Management Trainee" , he says, "working in every department in hotels, three, four and now five star. Actually, I was an Engineering student, came into hotels quite by accident." As we walked around the Queen's under transformation, he drew my attention to the original ceiling mouldings of a Victorian age, being lovingly restored. Upstairs, the bedroom walls were being given a soothing shade of puce- blue- ice green.

"What is necessary to maintain is the very colonial character of this hotel. It is actually the finest colonial edifice in this country and needs to be given this true Victorian aura. When I met Palitha last year I simply had to tell him of how I felt. I told him that this hotel can be the Raffles of Sri Lanka. I suppose I sounded so enthusiastic that Palitha was fired-up too. Anyway, he must have gone to his Chairman, and that is how I came in. It was suggested that I give proposals for restoration and refurbishment."

Well, it must have been some proposal! The nitty- gritty was hammered out at subsequent meetings but, as Anura said, he had his own ideas about what a hotel should be besides the obvious decor and facilities. "For one thing, I had to work with an architect who had this immense scope of vision, and I found that the Queen's had picked the best. Anton Jacob is an amazing man. Quite unstoppable when he gets his teeth into anything.. and a perfectionist... True, I had the project management on my shoulders, but the total picture needed a man of Anton's calibre."

For one thing, both Anton and Anura believe that a hotel cannot simply be an architectural monument. "This is the main drawback in this country. Some architects over-dictate and try to make a hotel an impractical showpiece. Then all it becomes is a showpiece - like a cardboard cake with a layer of attractive icing and nothing else. The architect must generate, in his conceptualising, the true warmth and humanity that makes a good hotel."

But to do so much in so short a time? And to refurbish with such demanding eye for theme, for history, for effect, for atmosphere? And to begin cracking up the old, tearing floors apart, moving doorways, pulling down the inside shops..... a time to splinter and wreck and take apart, and more time to put it all, like Humpty Dumpty, together again . Sixty days! That was all the time they had. "Make," said Chairman Kithsiri, " a miracle!" Work began in late May, and suddenly, gloriously, it was all over, ready to go as never before!

I found, walking through a mess of steel scaffolding and work benches, plaster dust in the little hair I have had with wires laying traps for unwary feet, that there could have been 300 workmen at any one time on any shift, all day, all night. " It would have been impossible if we hadn't the experience and if we did not make effective negotiations with the contractors," Anura said.

Anton was perhaps the liveliest wire of all. " Do it or get off the site!" was his crisp reply to anyone who dared trot out the usual excuses. Above all, there was the grim truth to be faced. A hotel closed was losing around ten million rupees a month! Delays of any sort were absolutely unthinkable.

What I also found was such a miracle of co-operation. Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Malays, Burghers, Chinese, even a Malaysian...... they all worked together and faced so many problems together. Anton told me that Senaka Senanayake would provide a special painting for the entrance hall. From Hantane, Malaysian artist Ramsay Ong would provide another. Bedrooms and lounge bar will carry blown-up photoprints of the work of famous colonial artists of the 1800's provided by Destry Muller.

And the problems? "You must remember that this is a very old hotel," Anura said. "We found wiring within walls that was near perished. Not even protected by conduits. so much extra work surfaced as we went ahead that it made the effort seem near impossible. Then there was the problem of fabrics and fittings and lighting fixtures. The local market could do little. We had hardly anything to choose from and fabrication to design would have taken too long. Also,we simply had to keep the Victorian theme."

The miracle was possible, Anura said, because of very close monitoring. "We held weekly project meetings, increased resources to make up for any time that was lost. It was extraordinary teamwork."

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