A lawyer shows off his perfect Neoclassical Renaissance home to Kishore Singh.
He’s a man who doesn’t easily take no for an answer when he’s set his mind on something. This was something Rohit Kochhar’s architect was to find out, just as his wife — to whom he had proposed a record one hundred and sixty times “without embarrassing her or myself” — had discovered till she finally relented. The trouble was, he knew every inch and space and niche and alcove and pillar he wanted for his dream house. The problem? His minimalist architect thought otherwise.
“There were many acrimonious battles with the architect,” Kochhar does not laugh when he says this, as many might in recollection of something in the past. But then, Kochhar does not laugh often — the burden of office, you might say. For Kochhar, a Salman Khan lookalike with biceps to match, who set up the legal firm Kochhar & Co in 1994 and is already among the crème of corporate lawyers in the country, is an achiever. He had an enviable practice, an equally enviable lifestyle, and now he wanted a house to match it, but he didn’t want just another rich mansion of the kind you see only too often in New Delhi — he wanted, for all practical purposes, a Medici palace.
The Medicis, if at all you remember your history, were Florentines who, between the 13th and 17th centuries, were among the wealthiest families of Europe, interested in science, art and architecture, patrons (some say catalysts) for the Renaissance movement, who later became members of French and English royalty. Some of Italy’s grandest surviving architecture dates from this period and includes the Renaissance, the dark Venetian Baroque (akin to the English Gothic) and the supremely elegant Neoclassical. This latter was to render itself for interpretation in the classical architecture of much of Capitol Hill and its surroundings in Washington DC. And it was this, down to the last detail, that Kochhar wanted for his home.
To understand something of his motivation, you have to understand Rohit Kochhar himself. The national chairman and managing partner of the Rs 50 crore firm considered himself a misfit in Modern School, Delhi where the kids came in luxury cars whereas he, the son of a mid-level Telco executive, was only ever allowed to have even Campa-Cola on the occasions when there were guests at home. He attended (and passed with merit) university in Mumbai, but was soon back in Delhi, employed as a criminal lawyer who would specialise in the dreaded COFEPOSA, or Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities.
Nothing about this may merit notice but for Kochhar’s lifestyle which — this was in India’s austerity years — well, drew attention. He was surrounded, “professionally” he is at pains to point out, by attractive women; he drove imported cars to the High Court, drawing interest in his Honda CRX hard-top convertible and Toyota Corona; Reema Lamba (who would later sizzle on the big screen in her vamped up avatar as Mallika Sherawat) came to court to listen to him argue his cases. By now he’d made the switch to corporate law, having spent three weeks in Singapore cold calling companies to say he’d like to represent their interests in India.
The perseverance paid off, and Kochhar’s business has grown to include profitable ventures on the side: consulting for foreign investors, a tie-up with $8 billion investigating company Pinkerton, the search firm Confiarglobal, and legal outsourcing “at the top end”. Whether or not the firm is moving as he might have planned it, at least where his home was concerned, “I knew exactly what had to come where”, he says.
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“One of my weaknesses — it is sometimes also my strength — is my obsessiveness,” he says. When the architect said he wouldn’t find the people to recreate his dream in India, Kochhar chose to override his decisions. “The concepts were mine, the technical drawings were his,” he points out. But as a result of one of the clashes — the architect wanted a columnless atrium, Kochhar insisted on an atrium separated by balustrades with wider columns supporting their narrower versions on the first floor. “He was really angry,” he smiles but does not laugh still.
The house, in a neighbourhood of farmhouses, is handsome, a structure of sandblasted stone, its external pillars inspired by the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The ceilings, at least in the public areas, are at least the height of three apartments anywhere else. Mostly Christian art and sculptures sourced from Europe — chiefly Italy — are spaced throughout the house, and lecterns with little notices explain their origin and the art as you might expect to find in a museum. Cherubs and Cupids look about, while from the ceiling hang chandeliers imported from Czechoslovakia. “I did a lot of research in the Indian market, travelling to Udaipur and to Agra with my consultant to look at lights there, but finally had to go to Prague for five days to pick up the sets I liked.”
“A ceremonial space is what I wanted,” he says, and the house is clearly that, with a staff of 27 — including a pandit, a request from his wife, whose puja room is the only aberration in its otherwise Palladian spaces — to look after it. Instead of a swimming pool, he has a tennis court on the premises (it was the first thing to be put up on the site says his trainer, whom he usually beats at the game), and there is a well-equipped gym in the basement. “I play four hours of tennis every week, and work out for two hours at the gym” — also weekly, he says, jotting up his schedule as you might expect a lawyer to.
The drawing and dining rooms overlook a huge lawn shorn off any attempts at fuss — this is where he might entertain on a cool evening. The dining room has a table to seat eighteen, and in the drawing room he has had his parents’ wedding pictures painted as portraits by artists from Jaipur. “It was a surprise for them,” explains his wife Sonali, “they had no idea why I’d borrowed the photographs.” “They saw it on the day of the housewarming,” for a moment you suspect Kochhar is misty-eyed.
If at all there is anything missing in his home, it is an absence of books that almost stares you in your face — the Medicis, after all, were prolific readers. “But I do not read,” says the intense but articulate owner of this revivalist Medici palace, “I wish I did, I envy those who do, I feel I would be able to speak better, understand more, I could,” he says verbosely but precisely, “be a man of words.”
Maybe it’s not too late yet to add a library — perhaps of the greatest works of the period from that continent — to this little slice of Neoclassical Europe in suburban Delhi.