We speak to the woman behind an innovative home in India's capital city, which was created with the help of two local designers.
The route to the Poddar residence is down one of Delhi’s, indeed India’s, arterial roads. The traffic noise, the shuddering roar of planes overhead and the motorway groaning with overloaded lorries are both maddening and stimulating. This is a country on the move, in a hurry, on a mission: to join the global community. But order is quite suddenly reinstated by a broad, long and smooth tarmacked avenue with manicured grass verges and high hedges. And right at the end of this meandering drive is the Poddar residence, which brusquely dispatches any preconceived, foreign notions of a postcolonial India stuck in the past.
This is a daring postmodern edifice, a series of hollow concrete cubes and cuboids stacked in perfect symmetry. It’s stringently rigorous. On the garden side – the front of the structure – giant plate-glass sheets enclose the spaces. It’s an indefatigable statement asserting that India, in the area of architecture and design at least, has arrived. The effect is breathtaking, confounding and intriguing.
Lekha Poddar is disarmingly welcoming. Some Indian traditions are preserved – you’re immediately offered water and other refreshments. She and her husband come from old industrial families; now with two grown-up sons, they required two buildings that gave everyone a certain independence, yet at the same time maintained the tradition of the Indian nuclear family.
Poddar was clear from the start that she wanted to continue the radical architectural and design experimentation of their previous home, which was located closer to the centre of Delhi. “The previous house, which was built in the 1980s, was revolutionary in the Indian context in the way the interior functioned and moved,” she explains. “We created a 30-foot atrium with a 30-foot waterfall; we used materials such as granite where most people used marble; and we had stone walls, which we left exposed.”
Poddar could have picked any of India’s acclaimed, internationally schooled architects to design her new home. Instead she handed Inni Chatterjee, a young, Indian-trained architect, his first commission. With her general aesthetic clear – “I love the concept of clean, modern lines” – Poddar gave Chatterjee free rein for his design, provided it was low maintenance and able to contend with the extreme heat of summer and the torrential rains of the monsoon. He was keen to use concrete, wanting to show that, when used innovatively and moulded more like plastic, it could be a great building material.
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