Reviving the past at Amber Haveli

Even as vernacular style of building  fast goes out of favour in most of the developing world,  an awareness of reutilizing the past   is witnessed every now and  then.  Taking a view that traditional architecture is the more logical and rational way to build.  That using local resources and knowledge bases  creates un-superflous structures  meeting the needs of the location best, engages local populations of  builders, craftsmen and artisans and preserves inherited wisdom in the process of creating rich living spaces.
An example of such a project awaits visitors in the shadow of the 11th century Amber fort at the outskirts of Jaipur.
Surrounded by a cluster of  old homes, many in a state of crumble, stands the meticulously renovated 14 th century traditional Rajasthani haveli known to the locals as the `Chanwar Palkiwalon ki Haveli'.
 John and Faith Singh- promoters of the textile label Anokhi-  bought the old ruinous structure in the early 80s.  Following some thought and the help of designer duo Nimish Patel and Parul Zaveri, the structure was  restored using traditional methods and local artisans.  
Today the haveli  stands amidst fast fading buildings of  Amber village  as a proud testimony to  the age old skill and knowledge base of  Rajasthani craftsmanship. In  re-creating the space such the architects have not only brought a crumbling structure back to life but have managed to reconcile the past with the present  in a meaningful way : the haveli might have housed palanquin bearers at one time in the distant past, but in its refurbished avatar  it is a museum dedicated to the  history of hand printing in India.

Anokhi Museum of Hand Printing  documents the centuries old craft of hand printing  in India with particular emphasis on  the   revival of the traditional practice in the latter part of the 20th century. A refurbished building thus becomes a repository of stories of another renewal. 

The various indigenous techniques and methods of printing and their different process  -   the tools of the trade, printing and block making - are elaborately detailed.  The museum houses a delightful collection of garments created  with  hand printed fabric.  The museum also organizes day long printing and block making workshops by appointment.  

 The workshop and a visit to the museum when it did happen  has to be  rated as the high point of my trip to Jaipur. Not only is a day spent printing fabric a most fulfilling way to engage with a local tradition, but an exploration of the museum interiors with its many elaborate jharokhas (Windows) wall niches and arches   is a wonderful way of understanding the various elements of local architecture too.

A cool central courtyard or Aangan leading from elaborate wooden doors of Amber haveli  offers welcome escape from the bright sunlight outside. The  building is painted in delicate peachy-pink tones- an ode to  the pink city of Jaipur that houses it.  The facade with  elaborate balconies on the first and second floors  is decorated in wall niche shaped pattern in plaster relief. The  niches- faux and real, recur as a motif throughout the building.

High walls of the haveli shade the courtyard. Dark blue green columns that frame beautiful arches  lead into a chequered marble centre of the haveli. 

This typical feature of  traditional Indian house : An open to sky, central courtyard, is a  device that effectively introduces the outdoors right into the middle of the house without compromising the safety or privacy  of the residents.  In extreme desert climate of Rajasthan the aangan acts like a thermostat for the house, regulating the flow of fresh air  and temperature in the house. Sunlight filtering  into the house through the aangan ensures  adequate light  within the house as well. Here in the Amber haveli,  the aangan is covered with a specially made canvas  jaali or mesh to filter  dust  debris and birds from  the house.

The museum exhibits  are spread over  the three levels starting from the inner chambers of the ground floor leading to the workshop and block making area created on the topmost floor of the building.

The interiors of the museum in keeping with its purpose are kept purposely bare, such that the emphasis through out  a visit remains on the exhibits.  The minimal approach draws the eye and attention to intricate details of the  building effectively.  Elaborate niches decorate walls across all floors  of the haveli.  In a typical Indian haveli these niches or Taankh,  serve various practical purposes of  storing and displaying stuff.

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The  smooth shiny finish of the walls and interiors of the building is thanks to an ancient technique used in these parts.  Aaraish - a traditional mixture created  by soaking  crushed shells   with  yogurt and sugar in earthenware pots for over a year  mixed with  stucco  is plastered on to the walls to give a smooth shiny finish  and interiors that remain cool  on harshest of summer days. Yogurt  mixed with stucco? who would have thought ?!
 

Roam  onto the roof level and yet another decorative yet functional device catches the eye.  Elaborately carved Jaali's or meshes. The Jaali's at Amber haveli have been carved using different materials such as  metal (above) and wood.  The intricate geometric Islamic patterns are a clever means of ensuring ample light and ventilation into a space without giving up on privacy.
The Jaali windows cast mesmerizing shadows on  walls  in narrow spaces of passages and stairwells everywhere.  The space is dedicated to the the block making and printing workshop that the museum offers as a means of encouraging visitor participation.

Apart from being a handsome example of  what is possible to achieve with a little help from our own past,  Amber haveli also serves to highlight the plight of our `modern' choices. Among Indians of all strata to  build and develop necessarily means a departure from the past. Most  residential architecture prefers styles of buildings that are disconnected with our needs and sensibilities but are not necessarily as livable and generous as their  vernacular counterparts. At Amber haveli, the architects and owners take  a different direction altogether and yet arrive at sumptuous spaces, without  compromising  either functionality or aesthetics. Some thing to take back home from an erstwhile home in Amber village, Jaipur, and I do.

A visit to the museum has been on my wish list for a long time. Particularly attractive was the prospect of spending a full day printing a fabric with my own hands!  The experience and pictures from the workshop are a matter of a whole new post.. Keep reading !

DIY: Calendar art inspired Wall : Part 2

Continuing the living with calendar art story, here are two other niches.

These smaller ones are painted in contrasting parrot green and citron orange colours.  Although calendar art remained an inspiration in doing these two also, the theme is distinct from the first larger niche (story here)- in that, broad elements of a typical calendar have been used on blank backgrounds as opposed to a dense montage of images culled from calendars.

For the first of these niches, I started with a base of aged mirror for a bright reflective surface. My  local glass vendor cut a chor bazar buy  into neat squares, which we pasted onto ply with silicone.

A few touches of paint in different colours, a  few popular motifs  that recur in calendars ( the garland bearing elephant, the Devanagari letters reading `Shubh',  lotuses and a  decorative landscape), successive layers of modge podge and viola,  we had the niche! 

I sanded down areas  that I wanted to reflect more between layers of the sealant, although it is perfectly possible to have a glossy mirror surface.

The second one, was going to house an old brass Ganpati, a gift from my grandmother. Hence the choice of a color that contrasts well with the colour of the Ganpati. Here I just magnified a single motif- the lotus,  and printed it in varying sizes.  Colouring in with water colour pencils and acrylic colours to defined the blooms :

I wish I had a better picture, but the entire wall is just too wide even for my widest lense.  But if helps give a sense, here is the whole deal :

DIY : Calendar art inspired wall.

A good part of what I, like  countless Indians growing up in the 70s and 80s small town India know about art, culture and religion comes straight from a bright, kitschy calendar, or bazar print : the colour saturated, mass produced representation of deities, religious themes alongside chubby babies, freedom fighters, movie stars and romantic and idyllic landscapes.  These  psychedelic prints of benevolent Gods and Goddesses smiling down their blessings  on to living rooms, shop floors and street corners have  fired popular imagination and visual culture in the subcontinent for over a century .

Much of how we imagine our deities as, is coloured by years of  exposure to the generously proportioned Gods and Goddesses rendered in rich jewel tones in one too many calendars. I have always wanted to hang a few at home.  The problem with wanting to frame calendar art is that there is way too many attractive, fascinating and confusing options to choose from!

So while scouring the local flea market for appropriate prints ( as in, those that evoked memories of  other calendars in other homes )  I landed up coming back with a stash!  With some amount of thought, all of the 11 crumbling and yellowing  prints I found, landed up in a single niche right at the entrance of the house. 

Although the prints were mostly whole they had aged considerably, making  the paper very amenable to being decoupaged. So decoupaged they are, embellished with sequins paints and mirrors. Have two other niches to go. Will come back with them later. Until then, hope you enjoy these. 

It all begins with a single niche  hand drawn in the shape of a Jharokha and cut out along with two others near the entrance.

Cutting, priming, texturing  the wall and painting the Jharokha.

Croping and cutting from Calendars, pasting selected images  on a piece of ply cut in the shape of the Jharokha.

Detailing 

 Going over the pasted images with layers of any good quality sealant . I used modge podge. It is a good idea to allow the surface to dry out completely between applications.

Finally, getting Hem Singh to secure the finished  ply onto the wall :)

Featured : Hindustan Times Mint

Part of a blogger feature carried by Live Mint this past weekend... Ways to use and display old textiles bags.  I convert a few into cushions, putting them to use when I am not using them as bags.

Mirror worked, appliquéd, hand dyed,  traditional cloth bags are a ubiquitous fashion and practical accessory from every where.  Most of us  have a few lying about the house. Sometimes even the textile shopping bags one gets at cotton clothing stores these days are so hard to ignore !  (Anokhi, Fab India and Cotton's Jaipur dole out lovely eco-friendly , reusable, fabric shopping bags).. Here is a way to  use  them all - heirloom, high street or plain free.

Above: appliqued indigo dyded bag from Vietnam gets used as a head rest stuffed with old Tshirts and random scraps. The roughly put together stitches can be ripped open in a second, when one feels like putting the same to another  use, like as a  real bag perhaps?!

An old shopping bag from Cottons Jaipur, stuffed with a filler and embellished with pom poms and ghungroos..

An old  beauty from Kutch that used to be my Go to bag while in college,  used as a cushion somedays :)

The whole ensemble of cushions and textiles displayed in different  corners of the house. A casual seating area  in the living room in the above instance.
Hand made things are usually easy to throw together, as  even drastically different styles tend to work well together.   It is a good idea to balance the  scheme by combining solid coloured textiles with patterned textiles. Usually using different patterns used creating  different techniques- weave, embroidery, and prints  helps create a rich and attractive end result.

A big thank you to Komal Sharma from Mint for the feature :) ..Its particularly exciting to share the same space as Bhavna (of An Indian Summer) and Rajee (of  Rajeesood )  

Wall stories : Paint

Posting an update about this weekend's exertions.  Paint. The good news is that  colour being the last stage of a interior project means the whole deal is finally in its last leg. However this to me is the hardest phase,  too many decisions,  much procrastination and too much confusion. 

We finished testing shades on most walls finally.. Positing the colour palette for the house.

Entrance 

Family / TV area

 One wall in the living room is going to be just short of shocking pink ! ( I know I've lost it totally, but this had to be done once in a lifetime  ;) - its a largish wall- the largest in the house and thats a lot of colour.. fingers crossed :))

African Mud and black colours

We want a verrrry Red Red, was the brief from the girls .. they got their wish ! The plan is to balance the red with a buff coloured wall in the same room also

Lime green and blue for the boy.. I thought my years were ringing when he said `cerulean'.. I want a cerulean blue.. :)

Thats all for today folks.. Am off for a short break.. Will be back with more news from the house end of next week ! DO leave your comments and feedback.. ! I want somebody to dissuade me from going pink while there is still time!!!

Down but not dirty.

The relative quite  on my desk lately in spite of the enthusiastically penned mission statement earlier, is mostly due to a home project underway at frenzied pace. Yes, am preparing to move yet again... ! Luckily  the move is just to another apartment within the same city.  As the space takes shape over the next few weeks, there will be more to share  until then,  here is a post about ideas. 

Have been engrossed in all manner of things. Floors, flea markets, furniture, paint and the like.
Today's post is going to be about an aspect of home dressing that I never really paid too much heed to until a few weeks ago when rotten parquet became a bone of contention. Three floorings needed to be ripped and relaid.  The humble grounds beneath our feet indeed, only somehow they end up making or  breaking spaces completely.

I grew up in a house  with wildly coloured, wildly patterned mosaic tiles.  My grandfather designed  these himself.  I remember watching him supervise the laying under his strict gaze. This was in the early seventies.  Dadaji, had spent his youth in a Bombay in the throes of art deco craze.  Only  later when I moved to the city myself and saw things up close did it become clear  to me where his love for elaborate mosaic tiles and checkerboard floors came from!

Mumbai or elsewhere, go looking for floors and you will come across a barrage of jargon,  Moroccan, Italian, marble, heritage, Athanguddi, Azulejos, stone, ceramic, sandstone, composite, Jaipur, chevron, mosaic, terrazzo, painted, inverlochy. There is just too much to choose from.

Having lost much sleep over a wide range of choices,  I finally know what I am going to do with the rotten parquet.. It is impossible to list my entire reference file here, but will share ideas and inspirations I have picked up along the way in today's post.  I don't have particularly  pretty pictures of floors  tiles and the like, for those you need to head to pinterest, which is rife with stunning effects! These are mostly humble records I made with my iPhone for my reference, while scouring the markets and else where.

Hopefully  with the final finished product which will make a future post and this one, it will be possible to piece together a picture of how exactly the ideas translated to actual floors.

A final word about the inspiration :  The choices I made rest on three different factors, first- the relatively tiny budget, second- somehow ideas registered from travels or surfing the net etc muscled their way in (not just on the floors but rampantly and randomly in other corners too ! More about that later though ) Finally, from in and around Mumbai- my forever Muse!! 


Starting with the city it self. I  am taken by old Mumbai  Heritage floors....

Encaustic tiles in an old Mumbai building

Visit any old Mumbai building and you  are sure to notice the  'Mintons'. Richly patterned, startlingly  coloured and beautifully weathered encaustic cement tiles imported to the erst while Bombay Presidency by Liverpool based Minton's Ltd.
In production since the 12th century when  Cisterician Monks in England  hand made  them to pave  floors of European churches and monasteries- the art vanished a few 100 years down the road.  During the 1830s  several British firms  attempted to revive  the medieval art, one of the most successful  being Herbert Minton.

Most old buildings in Fort and neighbouring areas in Mumbai boast these striking tiles from bygone times..  

These are cement tiles in which the pattern or figure on the surface is not a product of the glaze but of different colors of clay. A tile may be composed of as many as six colours. The pattern is inlaid into the body of the tile, so that the design remains as the tile is worn down. These may be gazed or unglazed and the inlay may be shallow  as an eight of an inch, or as deep as  a quarter inch.

Recently restored tiles on stairs, gallery and corner,  Mumbai.

In  the initial years of  the British colonial period, the  tiles would be imported from England. Until they started to be manufactured locally in the early 1920s. They remained in manufacture until the 1940s. In the recent years,  a few tile makers based in Mumbai and elsewhere have  revived the old style of floorings.

Minton tiles on the landing of the grand staircase of a Museum in Mumbai.

Layers of vinyl peel exposing the  striking original Minton  floor in a crumbling building in Kala Ghoda, Mumbai.

Then there are good ol'  Ceramic tiles ...

Reference  image taken at a tile shop in Fort, Mumbai

Brightly colored, readily available and easy to lay. Add to it, the wide range of tiles and makes to choose from to suit all manner of tastes and decor.

 I chanced upon a stash of these old furniture tiles from Gujarat at a local flea market the other day.. (picture below). I have no idea about their vintage, make and  style etc.. From the look of it, they look like Portuguese inspired, the kind I have spotted in many a old Mumbai buildings. Do enlighten me if you have any idea about these.  

Hand glazed furniture tiles, from a flea market, Mumbai

                     

I am not quite sure about where these will go in the house at this stage.

Finally  getting back to my childhood home, I would like to do a spin on the traditional chequered black  and white with a Chevron pattern floor somewhere in the house..

 Wide V's of the Chevron  on the floor of a Colaba restaurant, Mumbai

Vibrant, contrasting patterns from a heritage hotel in Rajasthan.

Old chequered floor  in an old Mumbai building.

Blueprint

In February this year, I would have completed five years of blogging. Each year around this time, I'd think about the blog with an intention of evaluating the space and my motivations. What does it mean to blog? Why a blog? why about homes? Whose home? Mine? Others- These and  other questions I did not articulate to myself very well in the beginning.
What to say?  How to say?  Will there be stuff to talk about all the time? will people read?

Each  time I tried to pin down the answers,  other important distractions veered me off  course.  Only this year, I am going to do it!
Before January gets by and this baby is already  Februaryish ripe and passing.  Here is the first post of the year. A little late perhaps but  other things have been kept waiting. Hopefully there will be  lots of posts  and much to share in the successive months of 2013, but it all begins with this mission statement of sorts.

When I started, this is all I could think the blog was going to be about :

"Inside. homes. life. kitchen. photography. stories. outside. journeys. travel. meandering. constructions-deconstructions."

Random. Just a broad list of topics. "Kitchen capers" ?!! did I really say that?  Does it get more superficial than that ?

--When with the benefit of hindsight, I can already say that what has come off the journey has been anything but!.

With a little more thought, here is what it is:

A document about home- mine and others I encounter. Home as a shelter that houses, families, people, hopes, dreams, aspirations. The aesthetics and practical matters that go into making it home.  
Not so much life as ways of living- the cultural, aesthetic and art of living. That would include traditions, cultures,  arts and crafts.

Why people build? how they build? Cities that are threaded together by many homes, buildings, structures, and spaces in general. And because  the private and public are interconnected,  markets, bazaars, gardens, museums- pretty much wherever serendipity leads. So journeys near and far.

The past and  the present. Histories, traditions that ought to inform and empower.
All of that and also kitchen capers...;)  and other capers of  sane and insane variety is what this blog is all about..!

As for the psychology,  dramas, laughter, blood, tears and dreams that also go into making homes, will leave most of that out, most of the time :) -   that makes the girl in the girlabouthome a bit of a nonentity.. but its better that way.

About me?  I am a drifter. Always running from this and that..Escape with me. If you like a particular escapade, leave me a line, am always up for a conversation... so I will revert no matter what.

Apart from that I am also a photographer and writer. Love cities- my current affair with Mumbai well into the third year.. I do all the things that avid city lovers do- walk around, connect with one neighbourhood or the other regularl, photograph, read and learn something about the place every day.  A lot of my city stories spill on to my other blog : Girlabouttown...

This major task out of my way..promise to be back to the business of updating the blog the fastest I can... If for some reason my wanderings lead me astray for intervals, please bear with me..  Although I tend to go off radars every now and then, I do almost always come back!