BENGALURU: On Hall Road, near Richard’s Park, stands a nearly 100-year-old bungalow that has been with Veena Mohan’s family for generations. While the rest of the neighbourhood is fast changing into concrete blocks, this quaint monkey-top house stands as it was. “We don’t ever plan to develop it,” says Krishna Mohan, Veena’s husband. “We will renovate it and will make efforts to preserve its heritage appeal.” “It used to be a much-quieter neighbourhood, with children playing on streets and cycling to Mount Carmel, where my wife used to study,” says Krishna. “Her family lived in a bigger house adjacent to this bungalow and that has been brought down. But they have retained five other bungalows they own in this neighbourhood.” Veena’s father Ramakrishna used to own the Duke’s billiard parlour on Brigade Road, in the seventies, and is the brother of VP Deendayal Naidu, who was the city’s mayor in 1955.
While the land on which the structure stands measures 12,000 sq ft (which is nearly a third of an acre) and could fetch a king’s ransom, it is hard to make money keeping the bungalow intact. But the couple has leased it out to Rings and Roses, a wedding planning company, which offers this as an exclusive and unusual event space.
The bungalow has a simple plan, which has been recorded by design and construction firm Mason’s Ink. The entrance verandah, with a room on either side, leads into a main hall. This hall, flanked by two side halls, leads into the back verandah that has a toilet on either side. There is a courtyard at the back where sit-down meals are served for weddings. The space is also rented out to host kitty parties, birthday parties, conferences, and book launches.
“The house is a colonial bungalow of Gothic design,” says Sridevi Changali, conservation architect at Mason’s Ink. “Its significant architectural features include monkey tops as sunshades, trellis work with wooden slats, Madras terrace roof and louvered windows.” About its structure, she says, “The foundation of the house is stone, plinth is a stone slab, walls are 18-inch sandwich walls with interior and exterior faces made of bricks and centre filled with rubble and the sloped roof with a steel ridge section is made of Mangaluru tiles set on wooden rafters and purlins”.
Director of Rings and Roses, Rosemary Rathnam says that the plumbing system had to be totally redone and so also the electrical wiring. “There was an outhouse at the back which was crumbling and it had to be redone,” she says, adding that it is rare to find so much greenery in the heart of the city. “The garden area is 13,000 sq ft and has many old trees including fruit bearing ones give a lot of shade and keeps the place cool all year round,” she says.
Maintenance of the building is not easy. “It seems to be made of sand and mortar, the ceiling is leaking and you cannot add many modern facilities to it,” says Krishna Mohan, who lives with his family in Benson Town. If the Mangalorean tiles need to be replaced, they will have to hire a worker from Kerala. Rosemary says, “To replicate the broken gables and monkey tops, we managed to find a carpenter all the way from Ambur”.
Krishna Mohan says, “We may have to bring down the bungalow and recreate it… we hope to move into it and live in it someday. We are a family of three, including my son, and may have to add another wing.”
Rosemary got a call last year from a lady who said that Bungalow 7 was owned by her grandfather who was British and that she had lived there as a child. She had seen the house on a Facebook page and reached out. “At first I did not believe her, as all houses down the street looked identical,” says Rosemary. “Later, when I did find a flag post that she’d mentioned, I realised that she was indeed talking about Bungalow 7… Her father had built it to host the Welsh flag.”
(With inputs from Sangeeta Cavale RK)
