The driveway to the Museum House in Edappally is three hundred metres to the hill top. When the house was built, in 1959, the hill was barren surrounded by bare land. Today, as it gets ready to host artists for a week-long art residency programme, beginning September 18, its current disposition as a house for art will immensely satiate its deceased founder, Kerala’s renowned entrepreneur and patron of art and culture, R. Madhavan Nayar.
Credited for pioneering the State’s foray into marine and seafood business, he is also the founder of Kerala Museum of History and Art (1985) that stands in the six acre precincts of the Museum House, formerly called the Founder’s House.
Raj Nayar remembers spending his summers as a young boy at his uncle’s sprawling house. An architect who is now remodelling spaces there to suit current needs, Raj is amazed at his uncle’s progressive sensibility behind building a house with an international architecture – with art deco and art nouveau elements – at a time when architecture here was still conservative.
“In the context of the milieu he came from and lived in he took effort in building a house of choice and populating it with varied objects of art,” says Raj. An Australian architect, Kevin Peterson, from the Madras firm ‘Pithavadian and Peterson’ was hired to design the house. Its outhouse with a suite of rooms, veranda and kitchens came up before the main house was constructed. The rooms had air conditioning and a swimming pool too was built alongside. “The priorities were that way,” says Raj about the social requirements of the owner.
Of the main house the basement is a complete unit with a suite of rooms, office and porch built for a “certain category of guests”, who can remain unaffected by the happenings on the floor above. The main level holds the porch and opens into a hall, library, study and two adjacent bedrooms. Off the dining hall are back up spaces – the pantry and kitchens. A flight of steps takes one to the founder’s suite. In the late 60s another set of rooms was added, when Madhavan Nayar’s widowed mother came to live with him.
“By any standard this was not a house for a bachelor,” says Raj about his uncle’s marital status and the house. But to get a sense of the grandeur that the house spells one needs to know about the man behind it.
Madhavan Nayar was a student of art and history but had an unusual entrepreneurial streak in him, “the desire to do something not necessarily by the book.” A few months into a comfortable government job, he quit it and came away to Cochin. He is supposed to have walked into Sir Robert Bristow’s office and expressed a desire to work with him. Intrigued at the young man’s boldness he was immediately hired as Sir Bristow’s Personal Assistant and soon proved his credentials. At the end of WW II Nayar saw sense in buying decommissioned war ships and found a buyer for them, a deal with which he hit pay dirt.
He then established his company, Marine Products Export and began a whole new industry. For two decades he held complete sway over the industry after which he returned to his inherent love for art and culture. He founded the Kerala Museum of History and Art in 1985.
In the three decades that Madhavan Nayar lived at Founder’s House, it saw great and good times. “There were huge events, parties with carved ice, candle light dinners and the works. Personalities of great eminence visited the house, almost all the Chief Ministers of the State. The entire hill was consciously planted with trees. What you see now were all planted in 1959,”says Raj.
In 2012 the Founder’s House changed name and relevance to become the Museum House. Its high perched lawns surrounded by magnificent trees opened up to the public converted into an open air amphitheatre and hosted the Museum Festival, programmes of dance, music and theatre. Currently as renovation work progresses at the house, a fine patina of dust sits on the old sheets that cover the period furniture, clocks, chandeliers, crystal, delftware and paintings. The collection a testimony to the keen eye of a man who treasured the fine arts. “He populated the house with art; he would buy them on his travels; it’s an eclectic mix,” says Raj adding that by the 80s Madhavan Nayar’s interest in art had changed. “He began studying art traditions of contemporary India and put together a remarkable collection for which he built the museum later on.”
A curious black collie with sleep filled eyes sits on the centre table of the house as plaster and paint are applied on the walls. Raj says nostalgically about the curio. “It used to be under the table earlier, now it sits on the top.”
