A Hotelier Collector: Peter Harris, owner of Doornberg

Twenty years collecting. One 18th-century Dutch villa above Galle. Inside Doornberg, Peter Harris's quietly remarkable private gallery, where Shanghai meets Sydney meets Sri Lanka and nobody, on inspection, seems remotely surprised by it.

From Shanghai to Sydney to Colombo, hotelier Peter Harris has spent two decades collecting art. At Doornberg, his restored Dutch villa above Galle, the collection comes home.

There is a particular sort of person who, having spent twenty years at the helm of a luxury fashion group living between Shanghai and Hong Kong, decides that what he really wants to do next is restore an 18th-century Dutch colonial villa in the hills above Galle and hang it, slowly and deliberately, with two decades of acquired art. It is not, you will be unsurprised to learn, a crowded category. The category, more or less, is Peter Harris.

Harris is Australian by birth and education, with a Florence chapter on the side because the more interesting biographies tend to have one. Asia took him for two decades. Sri Lanka, eventually and decisively, took him for good. He arrived in 2005, looking for sanctuary from the urban rinse cycles of Shanghai and Hong Kong, and by some happy logistical accident spent his first night on the island at a place then known as The Dutch House. The very villa, as it happens, that he would one day own, restore and rechristen: Doornberg.

The same year, more or less, he began to collect art seriously. The two events are not related, and yet of course they are related, in the way that the most decisive things in a life always seem to be.

When Harris finished the restoration in 2024, what he had on his hands was, very conveniently, a small miracle of curatorial real estate. Doornberg is reserved, austere, blank in the best sense: high walls, strong proportions, the kind of gallery-grade quiet that contemporary art tends to need and rarely gets. Built by the Dutch in the 18th century with the taste for restraint that the Dutch arguably invented, it might have been designed expressly for the hanging of art. It wasn't, of course. But it might have been.

Onto these walls Harris began to layer twenty years of acquisition: an international collection long in the making, newly discovered Sri Lankan voices, and a handful of works commissioned directly for the villa.

Harris's instinct for Sri Lanka has been, above all, to listen. He found his way naturally enough to the Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo, the country's most committed champion of Sri Lankan-born and Sri Lankan-based artists, and from there into the wider local conversation.

The entrance hall belongs to Hema Shironi. Her Mended Fences II, an eight-foot work in embroidery and thread, runs the full length of the wall and addresses, with quiet seriousness, the questions of history, religion and mythology that any thoughtful look at this part of the world must eventually meet. Chandraguptha Thenuwara's Glitch asserts itself elsewhere, set against a charcoal-painted wall in a living area, the kind of pairing that only works when someone has thought about it. Two figurative pieces by Jagath Weerasinghe, acrylic on paper, hang above a freestanding bath (a placement that delights rather more than it should). Laki Senanayake's sculptures hold their ground, solidly, in the communal room. And above a mid-century chaise longue, Abdul Halik Azeez's day dreamer you are 35 is picked out by a precisely placed spot, which is the sort of detail you only really notice when it has been done properly.

The international collection has been allowed its own breathing space. From Australia, Marissa Purcell and Michael Cusack, two voices about as different as Australian contemporary art currently has to offer, sit across a room from their Sri Lankan counterparts and, somehow, neither feels out of place. From Shanghai, Weng Jijun's minimalist work presides over a deep sofa and a coffee table heaving with monographs, while Jiang Penghi's Polaroid Film No 42 holds a corner with the kind of slow confidence that Polaroid film, of all things, very rarely manages.

Taken as a whole, it is a portrait of one man's eye: modern, minimalist, diverse, unafraid of colour where colour is warranted, and tuned to that quietly difficult question of what should hang next to what.

Acquisition is half of it. The other half, and the harder half, is curation: where, beside what, in what light, at what height. Harris is good at it. Every wall, corner, table and doorway at Doornberg has been considered, and the result is a villa that gently insists on being read like a gallery without ever quite announcing itself as one.

Guests are handed the keys to the room and the time to take it in. That, in the end, is the most generous thing a collector can do with a collection. It is also, very precisely, what Harris, the hotelier who hangs his own wall, has done at Doornberg.

Vivid yellow monochrome painting on a charcoal-hued wall above a round antique dining table with carved wooden chairs and ceramic bowls, from Peter Harris's contemporary art collection at Doornberg, Galle, Sri Lanka | The Aficionados.

Peter Harris, owner and art collector, photographed on the yellow-columned verandah of Doornberg, his restored 18th-century Dutch colonial villa above Galle, Sri Lanka | The Aficionados.