An interview with Max Duddy, Co-founder of Wilde & Co. - Sri Lanka

Photography Wilde & Co

Wilde & Co. was born of an ambition to develop and celebrate a collection of uniquely beautiful, often remote and consistently charming properties in Sri Lanka.

Not necessarily the grandest, certainly not the largest, and with limited reference to luxury in a traditional sense, but rather those that offer a personal, lasting and authentically Sri Lankan impression of this beautiful island.

Wilde & Co. operates with owners to develop, manage and promote its handful of beautiful hotels and lodges across Sri Lanka.

Hi Max, firstly a huge thank you for taking the time out for us, I hope all is way and safe in Sri Lanka. What is keeping you busy and spirits high during this isolating period we find ourselves in?

We’ve been ‘locked’ up at Rukgala – a yoga retreat we run in the middle of the island – for the last three weeks. We’ve been stressing the phrase “aren’t we lucky to be here” – but we are of course. It’s a beautiful spot. Pals cooped up in the heat of Colombo have a much bigger struggle. We have two wonderful French and American teachers with us right now so my wife and I have been delving more into our yoga practice; more novel for me than her.  A lot of the team here have headed back to families but what’s left of us are keeping the place in shape and looking forward to seeing guests again soon.  

So where did your journey start and what brought you out to Sri Lanka?

I’d taught for a few months at a school in Kandy after university, and had a year in 2008/9 living on a tea estate and working on a project in Indonesia. Amongst that I worked in PR in London for five or six years – unsuccessfully enough to see no opportunity cost in packing up and heading to SL permanently around 2012. At that point a cousin and I had set up a small travel business designing trips into Africa and Sri Lanka. I headed here to develop that but fell happily more into property management – running the tea estate as a small hotel and developing a second property, now running as Rukgala.  

What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in the past 6 years?

Hard to pick just one! The bombs here last April were devastating for the island and business of course was acutely hit. There’s a sense, though, of all (hoteliers) being in the same boat and so the personal challenge feels less daunting. We’re in that realm again now. When you know others are facing the same issues it’s somehow easier to keep calm and just get on as best as possible. As a foreigner – with pathetically limited Sinhala (the most-spoken language) – I’ve found the greatest challenge to be knowing what’s fair and what’s not. What’s a reasonable price, what’s a reasonable salary, what’s a reasonable amount of legal compliance? Business can feel a constant game of trial and error and that occasionally is exhausting.     

What would you say is the most enjoyable thing about your job?

There’s a lot to enjoy. The hotels we run are small and have small teams so there’s a good closeness with the ‘staff’. At Ashburnham for example, one of the tea estate hotels, a lot of the staff have been there ten years or more so working alongside them is good fun. We’re fortunate to also attract a really interesting set of guests at our properties so spending time with them is often a pleasure. I recently married one of them, in fact.    

What led to the creation of Wilde & Co.?

I’d been running Ashburnham and Rukgala and a good friend, Tim Edwards, had, with two partners, established Gal Oya Lodge – a beautiful safari lodge in the east of the island. We’d shared office space in Colombo for some time and given the way the properties sat nicely together for tours of the island we saw it as a natural fit to work together under one management company. We’ve since added three more to the collection so are growing Wilde & Co. as a hotel brand.  

What would you say are you hopes for the future and anyone thinking about travelling out to Sri Lanka?

Now is an incredibly difficult time for the travel industry and it’s a tough ask to predict how the sector will look coming out of this crisis. There’s no doubt been a shift to more experience-led travel in recent years and I’d hope that the trauma of what’s going on now would encourage that trend; people valuing even more the opportunity to explore and experience life beyond their own. For Sri Lanka I’d hope it’s able to continue in its growing appeal. Visitor numbers here have been on a steady climb and we were really happy to see how quickly things picked up after last April. That said, both April last year and the recent crisis will have put doubts in the minds of many considering hotel development. Sri Lanka still has the opportunity to choose the way it positions itself as a tourist destination and so more thought and caution from developers is no bad thing.      

What are you first going to do when the lockdown is over? 

There’s a lovely golf course within a few minutes of where we are now so, unable to even get on that for the last month, once we have the all clear, I’ll be on the tee.