| Summary: | Over the last two decades, there has been a visible increase in the rehabilitation of colonial-era structures in the city of Colombo, Sri Lanka. After Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009, many privately-owned residential dwellings were repurposed as businesses. One such prevalent business is the boutique hotel. This article examines the Maniumpathy Boutique Hotel and the Tintagel Colombo, two colonial mansions cum boutique hotels, to explore the careful curation of domestic spaces that has arisen as a result of this change in use. The author draws on the notion of persistence and colonial debris by looking closely at the state of what remains at both Maniumpathy and Tintagel. The article first situates colonial dwellings historically in Colombo and then constructs the specific histories and contemporary conditions of Maniumpathy and Tintagel. Throughout, the article elucidates how the revival processes of these dwellings negotiate their colonial pasts and the configurations these pasts take when boutique hotels are curated to mask and reveal their histories. Analysis of these two boutique hotels reveals how the spatial practices of elite colonial dwellings transcend the colonial-independence divide.
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