Bunti Bakshi and Bindu Sethi have made it their passion to build homes for themselves, and now a resort, for people like us, says Kishore Singh
Among the many ways Bunti Bakshi might describe himself as, technocrat may not be something that trips easily off his tongue, yet that’s exactly what he is, supplying original parts to Suzuki, even though he seems to spend an inordinately large part of his life in the Himalayas. There he’s a farmer, builds beautiful homes, is an environmentalist and, now, hotelier — only perhaps the last professionally.
Keeping him company, when she’s away from her corporate job, is wife Bindu Sethi, who if she wasn’t soft-spoken and gentle, might have been a tyrant for her “nitpicking” — her word — that the napkins be folded right, the duvet covers to tightened so, the starch be neither too little nor too much, and the round table cloths be ironed but not folded to avoid creases!
In their home in Delhi, there’s evidence of a cosy intimacy in the living spaces, where the furniture and textiles tend to be comfortable rather than intimidatingly formal. Outside the living room, a deep verandah with a sloping roof is an echo of the kind of spaces they enjoy in the mountains, and which are rare to find in the city.
To one side of the living room there is a boat, a canoe really, from a stint that Bindu did in Thailand, “where it used to be filled with flowers and separated the drawing room from the dining room”. On the walls, there is art from Vietnam as well as, of course, India.
It is this same sensibility that Bunti and Bindu have bought to their many homes — in Majkhali, outside Ranikhet, where architect Sanjay Prakash helped them develop a contemporary retreat using local building materials and techniques, and which spawned a commune of similar looking houses rare to find anywhere in India; or in Jammu where “Bunti built a stunning home for my parents” when they were displaced from Srinagar, and now, more recently, in Bhimtal, where a 12-room resort, Fishermen’s Lodge, is their idea of a place for like-minded people, “friends, and friends of friends”.
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In the seventies, Bunti and Bindu might have been labelled hippies, but in the first decade of a new century they represent ideas and alternatives, a way of living that though it seems past is actually doable and accessible with a little sensitivity and perhaps measurable ambition. “On a visit to Ireland, we realised that back home in Uttarakhand there was no place we could recommend which you could book online, where the views were nice, the housekeeping simple but well-executed, and the food excellent,” they define the parameters around which the Lodge was born, overlooking the lake and with a deck that the authorities allowed them to take to practically its edge so that, on a summer’s day, says Bunti, “you can see mirror carp and mahaseer while having tea on the deck”.
Other things helped, of course. Such as the fact that “Bunti enjoys cooking and I enjoy baking,” says Bindu, or that “there’s so much joy, and so many surprises, in meeting strangers”, says Bunti. And that they’re not averse to sharing their “collection of 40 years of music”, or picnicking in the oak forest, where they’ve acquired some more “land for planting nuts and fruits and citrus” and building a “tented community on a minimalistic model” with water harvesting and purification systems to restore the environment. Central to their effort when building Fishermen’s Lodge — where Bunti was, in effect, the architect and Sanjay Prakash the civil engineer — was the architectural process itself: “I wanted to bring back the old construction techniques of keystone masonry using a minimal amount of cement, and stone from the site itself.”
Nor did they go to the nearest supermart to furnish the Lodge. They collected old furniture, but how would you find enough to fill a resort? They did the next best thing: loaded their beloved collection into a truck and shipped it to Jodhpur, where the made-as-old industry copied their designs “using seasoned, structural wood that came from the old havelis in the region”, with emphasis on the right finishes and tones, but most of all on comfort. All the lampshades were handpainted in Kashmir, the “fish” paintings, 200 of them, came from the artist Radha who lives and works in Pondicherry, and the living room sofas “were copied from a career diplomat friend who had bought it in Cuba”. When she couldn’t find the right round tablecloths, Bindu replicated a friend’s skirt, down to the six or seven circles of picot around the edges for a crinkly effect.
Servants who had been in the family for years were trained to handle departments at the Lodge. The flowers, in informal arrangements, are picked fresh from the garden. Waterbottles are slipped into the beds to keep them warm. The bathrooms have heaters and slatted wooden pattas to keep out the cold. Clouds come drifting through the large windows that open out from the guest bedrooms, and the deck is often draped in mist. “There’s no additional cost once the guests are here: they can open the fridge to get something to eat, sit anywhere, watch a movie, go on a picnic…” says Bindu. “That’s because we are not driven by money-making compulsions,” agrees Bunti, “for us it’s passion-driven.”
“I spend an extended weekend, Fridays through Sundays, at Bhimtal,” says Bunti, escaping even more frequently a little further to their home in Majkhali “where we tell guests they’re welcome to join us should the Lodge be full,” he says. As for Bindu, she leans back comfortably in an armchair with an old-fashioned cane weave — it’s difficult to tell whether it’s originally old or reproduced as old — and sighs, “It’s so much more enervating going to work knowing there’s a retirement plan and life to look forward to.” That and the linen curtains.