The Black Rajah butterfly lives in low-lying land and in the higher tea hills outside of Kandy, the original capital city of the ancient kingdom of Serendip.

It’s a pretty butterfly, dotted all over like a cubist painting with black, cream, oatmeal, grey and yellow flecks. Yet the Black Rajah is not one of those obviously beautiful butterflies, catching the sunlight with their bright yellows, blues and reds. Rather, its beauty reveals itself gradually. Its tapestry is rich and its colours are so sleek and chic that they seem to have been orchestrated by a European interior designer – all descriptions that could fittingly be attributed to my room at Kandy House.

Well, ‘room’ is not really an adequate description. Sri Lanka, rising out the ashes of 30 years of civil war in the north, a tsunami which hit its south extremely hard, and a general malaise when it came to anything investment- or tourism-related, does one thing exceptionally well, better, in fact, than I have seen in any other country I have ever visited – boutique hotels. They are usually wonderfully-converted heritage homes and country villas which now carry a few suites within their (sometimes hardly existent, the weather being a constant summer) walls. Instead of trying to get as many beds as possible out of the same space, the owners of these properties convert them into all-suite accommodation where a large bed area, a large bath area, and your very own piece of garden, terrace or private pool, is the norm.

Moreover, now is the time to visit, before the rest of the world discovers this staggeringly beautiful country seemingly untouched by the rampant commercialisation and bitterness of much of the rest of Asia (Bangkok anybody?) and literally blessed (never was a word so appropriate) with everything nature (or man) decided to bestow upon it, from tea plantations, forest, mountains and valleys to never-ending beaches, swathes of Indian Ocean, cinnamon, coconut and banana plantations.

I arrive at Kandy House two days after the infamous Esala Perahera – the festival which transforms Kandy from heaven to heaving as drummers, dancers and elephants compete for aural space – has ended. Just as quickly as they had descended, the tourists, both national and international, had evacuated not only the area but Kandy House itself. I literally had the whole hotel to myself.

Sri Lanka’s heritage homes do service in a particularly distinctive way – staff are very attentive, extremely discreet and almost always male. Staying with them is not about them, but about you. As one of the Kandy House boys brought me chilled passion fruit juice, I settled in one of the huge sofas in their open-air lobby, bedecked with the thick hand-woven fabrics which the country seems to want to keep to itself, and read through the Visitors Book. Every single comment was not only positive, but almost heart-breaking as previous guests lamented their departure.

My room, called the Black Rajah, is one of those rooms which can jolt even the most jaded of international travellers into happy wakefulness. In hot countries, the last thing you want to do is take a bath. However, having come from a five-hour car trip and faced with the gorgeous, modern, yet earthy bath, I just gave in to all the tea-lights surrounding it, upended the entire contents of the salt container and settled in for a few minutes of rest and restoration.

The bed is a four-poster one – the draped mosquito net lends it a colonial-in-the-tropics feel while the mattress is covered in the kind of down feather protection that gives sleeping a sinking sensation.

The shower area is cut off from what is essentially an open-plan layout by two low concrete walls which have been polished until they gleam. The overall effect is like sleeping in a very modern cave, which, on one side, leads to the internal courtyard, and on the other opens up to your very own stretch of landscaped garden overlooking the tea plantations.

It is the use of space that is so surprising. The rooms at Kandy House manage to give the feeling of living in your very own house. They are as far off from standard hotel rooms as you can possibly get. The design is even more surprising when you realise that the house was built more than 200 years ago, originally for local chief Ratwatte Adigar. Its colours – golden hues and black all over my room, and brighter tones in the common areas – are strong yet extremely relaxing. It feels even more like ‘my house’ as I’m the only guest. In fact, there are four times more staff than there are guests. Brilliant.

This means that in the evening I have a fabulous dinner in their garden with just the sounds of the cicadas around me. Kandy House operates on a set-menu basis, yet when I tell the local chef that I really love Sri Lankan rice and curry (essentially an array of seven to ten vegetable and meat curry dishes, accompanied by a mound of rice) he tells me that if I was not shy of spices (which I am not) he would serve me some Thai curries. Of course, it’s a gastronomic happy ending.

I sleep like a baby and wake up the next day to the glorious sunshine streaming in and the quiet murmurs of the tea-pickers from outside my window. The pool at the edge of the garden beckons and so does the huge ‘swing’ which is really a great big swinging bed attached to an ancient tree. The colours outside are beaming, the sounds enticing and Kandy House exactly the kind of place you can return to with much joy at the end of a hard sightseeing day. In fact, it feels exactly like going back home, only with a few more staff than you may be used to.