Kalyani Saha Chawla sweeps out nostalgia with this sentimental yet contemporary family home in South Delhi

House hushing is not a new trend if you’ve met the always minted 50-plus single women who have shrugged off excess baggage with elan, and there’s no one better to tell it like it is than style entrepreneur Kalyani Saha Chawla. Now, millennials may find it trendy to suddenly discover the thrill of decluttering and quieting visual interiors, but that is exactly what Kalyani did intuitively when she redesigned her grandparents’ fifties-style home in the heart of South Delhi, which she inherited from her father two years ago.

It was last year when Kalyani stood in the small inner courtyard or uthan in Bengali, which was recreated in Delhi by her grandmother, bringing in the traditional architecture of old Bengali homes in Kolkata, when the house was built, and saw her life as it is today — single, successful, swank — a showboat. Says the serial entrepreneur, “I’m single, my 24-year- old daughter lives abroad, I entertain and have guests all the time. I didn’t need the four bedrooms, a drawing and dining room that were all boxed in, and a garden patch that ran into the road. It had to be quieted, and opened up.”

The design was neither gran, nor grand. More Parisienne ease, with snatches of Bengali Baroque, lit up by the warm glow of nostalgia of childhood vacations spent here having been brought up in Kolkata. Kalyani set off with a deft eye and energetic rigour to make the walls vanish; convert the uthan into a glass-covered, sky-lit dining space that sent diffused pools of light on the downsized eight-seater table brought from Bali, and the desi upholstered chairs. Two bedrooms soon emerged with a third converted into an essential walk-in wardrobe, and the dining room seamlessly swept to a breezy drawing room space using furniture to define three sitting areas.

The formal L-shaped sofa that runs along the two walls, which was once the original hall, now spreads its arms wide with an invitation for open, free chatter. Across is another nook of a stylised sofa, a coffee table, loomed over by a glistening Moroccan mirror, with a console table below laden with antique silver, coffee table books and a large ceramic frog from Comporta, Portugal, reflecting a personality of humour with style. Kalyani calls it the gossip corner as it invariably turns into a saucy adda.

Inside Kalyani’s den reside airy etageres (open racks) for a smattering of books, collectibles, art and Rezon silverware placed discreetly; a majestic faux fireplace stands sturdy as the concealed television zooms down from the ceiling opposite a comfy sofa and coffee table. The colours and design of the room are both homey and chic — to chill and entertain — with the redesigned garden outside neatly defining the outer space, “It all fell into place magically,” says a visibly pleased Kalyani, “yes, the place does have a Pairisienne feel which I just naturally imbibed perhaps because of my Dior decade (nce) – like the mouldings on the wall, that runs all over the house — from the walls to furnishings of rich textures, lots of light, large windows that bring the sky in…”

But it’s the Kalyani design code of mixing modern contemporary art with the grandees where she aces the space — Bengal masters and India Modern stand respectfully with each other. There’s Jamini Roy’s Christian iconography of Jesus, the Last Supper to Mother and Child, apart from the master’s sketches gifted to her mother and inherited by Kalyani.

The Tagore trio is a wall buster — Abanindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy’s teacher who  modernised Mughal and Rajput styles to spearhead the Bengal school of art; his brother, Gaganendranath Tagore’s watercolour and their uncle Rabindranath Tagore, whose black ink painting of women in a shroud is dark but powerful. “This work has hung in my home in Kolkata and represents to me the quiet strength of women, when together, we are invincible. Reminding me of the strong women I have grown up with,” says Kalyani. Abutting classics are the modernists — Riyas Komu, FN Souza, Jogen Chowdhury, Jitish Kallat, Shilpa Gupta, Sunil Das, even an Anjolie Ela Menon head that was given to her by the artist.

Kalyani ran an art gallery, Montage Arts, and continues to dabble in buying and selling art for private collectors. And running along are Henri Rousseau-inspired wallpaper of enchanting jungles and wild beasts, the quirky pop-ups of an antique brass torso here, or a whimsy wooden monkey holding a lamp in the terrace garden, or keeping a Corbusier-inspired 50s wood and cane chair in splendid isolation — a hedonistic mix. Even as the stacked-up art and artefacts, colourful jungle and furniture, lamps and lighting, reflect on the floor to ceiling wall to wall mirrors, making the lush interiors luminesce in a watery gaze. As the saying goes, style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.

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