The nude over the fireplace

Gallerist Ashish Anand's "artfully" done up bedroom mirrors his vocation and serves as much as his private space as a more public arena meant to invite admiring gazes.

The master bedroom in a house is like the sanctum sanctorum: both the sacred and the profane happen there but it stays behind a million veils. Without having the privilege of lifting those veils, you can only imagine the life of the owner of that bedroom by being allowed to peep into that part of his house.

Ashish Anand, owner of Delhi Art Gallery, has a bedroom that, like the rest of his well-appointed house, is a shrine to art. Few people like to take their work home but for Anand, work and play come together to create a bedroom that is warm, inviting and a showcase for what he does for a living.

Says Anand, "When I first got into the art business, for me it was lucrative but then, my involvement became too deep and the motivation changed completely."

Anand's bedroom, in the original plan of the house, was actually two separate bedrooms. Being single and not requiring too much extra space, Anand decided to merge the two rooms into one.

The large space is, however, broken into two distinct areas with a fireplace bang in the middle "" one side for the bed and the other side housing a sitting area with a large Nakamichi TV, a desk and soft, comfortable sofas that allow you to sink in and gaze lovingly at all that art that surrounds you in the room.

Says Anand about the way his new home looks, "I wanted a blend of the classic and the modern, and the mother-daughter team of Sunita and Kohilika Kohli did well on that." The house, though, isn't about hiring a decorator to put it together. Anand speaks of the detail with which the artworks were selected for every nook and cranny (and that includes the bathrooms) of the house.

The house is about art and the way the art has been framed, selected and put together shows that the master of the house has been involved way beyond the call of duty. The house is Anand's baby and the walls tell that story well.

The yellow on the bedroom walls is a perfect backdrop for works of some of Indian art's greats. Says Anand, "Everything in the house was done keeping art in mind. I must have seen over 1,500 paintings before I chose the final lot in this room."

That effort hasn't been in vain. The two large windows of Anand's room overlook a casuarina tree that, when in bloom, is full of pink flowers. The Jamini Roy next to one window has a woman wearing a pink sari.

Anand points to one wall in the sitting area and says, "That has all the greats from the Bengal school." For the uninitiated, those would be Abanindranath Tagore, Nandlal Bose, A R Chugtai, D P Roy Chowdhury and Kshitindranath Mazumdar. On the other side, there are three Jamini Roys, including one of his early academic work done in 1910.

There are also some F N Souzas, including a large nude above the fireplace facing the seating area. Facing the bed is a Biren De work, signifying energy and spirituality.

I quiz Anand on this and he says, "The Biren De has great energy and you want to wake up to that. With the Souza nude facing the seating area, more people can enjoy it."

And Souza's smaller nudes can be found in Anand's bathroom, again not by accident but by design. The selection of the artworks, Anand says, has also been dictated by one more factor. He explains, "The strength of any artist is in their early works when they were struggling in their early years."

If the art is superbly selected, other accessories that make up the room cannot be ignored. The large carpet that covers some part of the seating area is over 100 years old and is from the tribal Malayar workshop. The fans and lights are from Italy and the sound system is state-of-the-art.

Though the house and the bedroom look all done, Anand isn't yet finished with his room. He says, "I keep rotating 50 per cent of the art in the house so that I don't get bored with it." Pointing to the Souza nude on his fireplace, he says, "But it is difficult to replace a painting like this." We couldn't agree more.