When you go looking for the postmaster general’s office on Palace Road, what greets you is a typical whitewashed government office, but a few steps further reveals a roughly 175-year-old mansion that seems to have slipped through a stitch in time, with the Mangalore tile roofs and beautiful bay windows to prove it.
Beaulieu (French word for ‘beautiful place’), once the abode of a British civil servant, a princess, and a former Dewan of Mysore, is currently undergoing restoration.
Built around 1860 by British civil servant Lancelot Ricketts, who served as the first editor of the Mysore Gazette and as the director of Lal Bagh, Beaulieu was part of grounds spanning 24 acres where the horticulture enthusiast experimented with farming, had wells, stables, a pond, and outhouses. “It was a whole lot bigger and stretched very close to Cubbon Park. Since then, it’s been sold off in 10 pieces. The old compound is gone, and there are no sheep in the gardens, no potatoes growing there anymore – it’s difficult to imagine all that,” comments historian Meera Iyer, who is also the director of the Bengaluru chapter of INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage), which is restoring the building.
A few decades in, Ricketts, for reasons unknown, sold the building to Princess Jayalakshmammanni (also the owner of Jayalakshmi Vilas Palace in Mysuru), the eldest daughter of Chamarajendra Wadiyar X, in 1900. It was her and her husband, the former Dewan of Mysore M Kantharaj Urs’ Bengaluru abode for decades until their daughter Leelavathi inherited it. “A lot of houses on and around Palace Road were owned by the royal family. Princesses had their own mansion in Bengaluru and a palace in Mysuru,” explains Iyer. During World War II, the estate was briefly occupied by the army, as Leelavathi allowed them to use it rent-free for the war effort.
With the post office acquiring it in the 1960s, the mansion was put to practical use – rooms converted into offices with metal bureaus, rattan-patterned chairs and plastic cubicle partitions. Despite this, it is not difficult to imagine the building as the luxurious mansion it once was. As architect Pankaj Modi notes, the building has largely been well-maintained. Explaining the damage the team encountered upon starting the project, he says, “Structural issues were minimal but we had to work on changes done over time which affected the character of the building – an added staircase on the rear side, right in centre of the facade, Mangalore tile roofs changed to sheet roofing, and vitrified tile floors.”
The front facade and garden, too, are remarkably well-maintained, although the main entrance now opens into the rear facade instead of the driveway that once welcomed carriages.
With phase 2 of the restoration coming to an end in the next 2 weeks, around 30 per cent of the structure will have been restored. The focus, for Modi, has been to restore the building’s old-world charm, while ensuring functionality. “We’ve taken up work in four rooms, the corridor, and the rear facade in the first two phases – redoing the roofing and plastering. The added staircase is being replaced with one that’s a little more sensitively done, because access is a functional requirement for
the office,” explains Modi, adding that materials for the project have been accessible at Bengaluru markets, and lime plaster is being made on site.
Kamakshi Devi Wadiyar, the daughter of former Mysore ruler Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, recalls faint memories of Princess Leelavathi, who lived in Beaulieu after her mother, Jayalakshammanni. “I have vague memories of going with my mother to Leelavathi’s Mysore mansion when I was a child which eventually became a part of the Mysore University campus. She was unwell at the time and passed away shortly thereafter. Beaulieu was sold to the postal department in the early 1960s when I was very young, by her husband Sardar Basavaraj Urs, after her demise”