Raseel Gujral Ansal's interior-design project is set back from one of the grand boulevards that make up Lutyens's Delhi. The city was created in the early 1900s and assumed the mantle of the second capital of the British Empire, so it was befitting that an air of spacious serenity was created for the government officers of the Empire's ruling elite.
The broad roads, laid out in a grid pattern, are fringed with burgeoning greenery, and hidden behind are the colonnaded Raj bungalows, which today are the residences of India’s top politicians and civil officers. Just a couple of kilometres away is Parliament House, seat of the world’s largest democracy. The refined residential atmosphere has been retained for nearly a century, and the quiet orderliness belies a power and influence that commands more than a billion Indians and demands increasing global respect.
So it’s all the more surprising that Gujral Ansal’s latest project is a “new build” in the middle of such a strictly controlled preservation area. The house is set in generous lawns, surrounded by high walls and, most importantly, had to consist of only a single storey to match the old Raj buildings. As this took care of security and privacy at the outset, she was able to contradict the Indian tradition for constructing inward-looking spaces, instead using plate glass for the exterior walls. This lends a genuine sense of liberation, a metaphor for the self-recognition, self-belief and ambition of a country looking outward rather than in.
For Gujral Ansal and Casa Paradox, the company she runs with her husband Navin Ansal, this was a comparatively small-scale residential project, but she was no less passionate and enthusiastic about it.
“From the start, I enjoyed an excellent relationship with my client,” she says. “We quickly established that we were aesthetically compatible, which made for a high degree of mutual trust. Having a strong rapport with your client is ideal – decisions can be arrived at quickly and clearly.”
The resulting design is a constant surprise. The architecture comes from a series of conjoined cubes, so the framework becomes one of verticals and horizontals – masculine and, on the surface at least, uncompromising. Yet Gujral Ansal has the innate flare of working with seemingly diametric opposites, and in shape, colour and texture plays with subtle and softening contrasts.
Take the entrance to the house, a semi-covered linear walkway: one side wall is faced with a hand-chiselled, dimensioned, grey stone cladding; bordering it is a broad water body on which hundreds of pom-pom-like saffron-coloured marigolds float. The combination of neutral grey and iridescent orange creates a drama of its own. But this dressed grey stone wall also forms the spine of the bungalow, making it one of the few solid structures in the house. It runs from the exterior to the front door, through the entrance hall and on to an inner courtyard, which includes another water body, again brimming with marigolds.
The inner courtyard is entirely open to the sky, and two sides are made up of giant panes of glass in the form of French windows.
“I always prefer to create a minimum number of spaces within an interior, and I resist solid walls as much as possible,” Gujral Ansal says.
Plate-glass sliding doors make up at least one, if not two, sides of every room in the house, so there’s always a sense of light and space.
In a climate where many think there’s too much natural light to cope with, Gujral Ansal constantly finds new and inventive ways to work with it, rather than fight it.
“There is so much you can do with available light,” she says. “Two of my favourite features in this house are the wood fins in the skylight in the entrance hall and the Venetian blinds that I have utilised around the interior. Both constantly offer varied, spontaneous graphic art as the angle of the sun shifts throughout the day, playing on the various textured surfaces I have introduced in the house, be it the stone dressing or the textured fabrics.”
Fluid spaces are one of Gujral Ansal’s dictums, which she achieves through “the use of consistent themes in any given project, using selected colours and varied surface finishes”. Here, she has applied a soothing tonal spectrum, ranging from white and dove through to grey and silver, “punctuated with high notes of mocha, acid green and brilliant saffron orange”. Surface finishes draw on the varied qualities of materials, including stone, wood, steel and mother-of-pearl, plus fabrics from silk to plaited and woven grass finishes. There’s a constant interplay with the rough and the smooth, the matte and the shiny.
“Since there is a consistency of colour, material and character through the house, in my view it effectively enlarges the whole design range,” she says.
Gujral Ansal has further softened the confines of “cube” architecture with the economic but effective use of applied decoration, and her abiding respect for the soft, often subtly voluptuous, curves and seductive lines of art deco remains an influence (the Casa Paradox furniture designed by her and her husband frequently draws on this sensibility). Her “cosmic” trademark image is introduced in the sets of candle stands in the living area.
“This pattern is based on a tantric design I once saw in an Ajit Mukerjee book, depicting the birth of the universe from the cosmic egg. It made a lasting impression on me and I’ve never really been able to forget it.”
The cosmic egg is the most random of patterns she has used, but she has also introduced spirals onto the cushions, and circles on the rug alongside the feminine curves of a pair of white ceramic vases in the hallway and the oversize orange glass vases in the main living area.
Art deco was the first style to attain a global status. In India, it brought about a striking mix of East and West – from maharajas’ residences to high-street shopfronts – that can still be seen today. Fusion is an international buzzword right now, applied to clothing, food and music. Of this trend, Gujral Ansal says “interior design is just another victim, and one can get so mired in the phenomenon that we fail to see that we are being strangled by a virus that is growing with weed-like ferocity. Nobody stops to question it, to step back and think how to properly apply it to their own environments.”
She believes fusion should have the ability to mould diverse influences into a cohesive whole, without losing the distinct identity of the environment in which it is being applied. Gujral Ansal is convinced that in the rush to achieve the effect of this global style, good sense and good taste are “all too frequently sacrificed at the altar of the behemoth”.
She has aimed to avoid such a sacrifice here, and the mutual trust between client and designer has yielded a special dividend in a project that not so much denies the local convention of looking inward, but rather runs with the outward intellectual evolution of India today.
“Culturally rich countries such as India can spawn amalgams that are truly evolutionary, and I am confident that India is in the process of an aesthetic evolution,” she says.
Certainly, Gujral Ansal is one of those playing an essential part of bringing about this cultural change.
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