Mira Gulati shows Gargi Gupta around her house, even as she insists that she’d rather talk about the jewellery brand she's launched.
This is a beautiful home, but if you ask me who’s this painting by or where this lamp came from, I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I got married only a year ago and the house is mostly my mother-in-law’s handiwork.”
Mira Gulati, CEO of Mirari & Co, is nothing if not honest. She’s also very gracious — going up and down the stairs in her very pregnant condition, showing us around the main reception areas of the Gulati family home in Rajokri, one of the most sought-after addresses in Delhi.
Mira, a graduate of the Gemological Institute of America, California and MBA from Babson College, would rather talk about Mirari, the “very, very high-end luxury jewellery brand” that she launched around two years ago.
Mirari, which prides itself on using the very finest of gemstones and metals and presumes to compete not with the desi Tanishqs and D’damases but with the Cartiers and the Van Cleef and Arpels of the world, currently retails out of one store at the Shangri La Hotel in Delhi, but Mira hopes to take it international next year.
At the moment, she’s in negotiations to sign on as brand ambassadress a young classical musician, the scion of India’s best known international export in the field of music and herself an accomplished performer.
We’re sitting in a small anteroom just off the front entrance, what Mira refers to as the study, whose rich furnishings — deep, very masculine-looking leather sofas, wooden flooring, Victorian fireplace with an electric coal fire and so on — contrasts rather oddly with the small, intimate family photographs in plain frames everywhere on the wall. It’s clearly the room where the less prepossessing of visitors are shown into.
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The house is a low structure, whose exterior is a jumble of straight lines and arches in a muted dun stucco which stands out against the lush green of the beautifully landscaped lawns with a line of low palms, and a variety of perfectly manicured shrubs.
“It’s actually three storeys but you only see two of them overground,” Mira points out. The ground floor houses the reception areas and the family lounge, while the mezzanine is given to sporting activities — the swimming pool, with a gym and pool table just off it — and the upper floor has all the bedrooms.
Inside, it’s plushly furnished everywhere with lots of silk and leather covered furniture, art on the walls and long bay windows that look out on the grounds which, combined with the high ceilings, let in a lot of light and give the interiors a feel of spaciousness.
Everywhere, there are little touches which speak of the homemaker’s distinctive taste and her wide travels — helped along, it is obvious, by an interior designer who knew how to put it all together and show off all the artefacts to best advantage.
Among them, a log of light birchwood that Mira says was bought on a visit to Indonesia, set against one wall of the main hallway — a kind of atrium really which the main entrance opens into and which rises two floors up — whose abstract lines and craggy patterns look striking against the off-white Italian marble of the floor.
A crystal stature of Ganesha occupies centre-stage here, placed on a silver-foil wrapped table placed on a faux leather carpet with square prints of what looks like tiger hide. Quite eclectic, eh?
A far happier effect is created by the lotus-leaf shaped ceramic plates in various sizes framed against the wall facing the swimming pool. “It’s one of those things that my mother bought a long time ago,” says Mira’s husband.
One of the walls near the swimming pool is taken up by a caricature on white board, a little dilapidated, a little torn in places.
“My parents-in-law got an artist on their silver wedding anniversary a few years ago, who made this,” Mira says, looking a little askance at my interest. “And then they got everyone to sign it. The ink’s running a little now.”
Some happy memories and lots of plush bric-a-brac— that’s what nice homes are made of.