Sometime in the 1930s Joseph Thaliath, who was studying to be a barrister at law in the United Kingdom, returned home to Puthenpally, near Varapuzha, with a building plan of a house he saw in London. He liked it so much that he wanted his house to be a replica. He decided to build his dream house on Market Road, near Kombara Junction.
Jacob Thaliath, grandson of the late Joseph Thaliath, who was Chief Justice of the High Court of Travancore (before unification of Travancore and Cochin States), lives there today with his family. He says he was very young when his paternal grandfather passed away, but that he has heard many stories about the house from his family.
The elegant 80-year-old cream and peach coloured Thaliath House, on 25 cents of land, wears her years gracefully. As one enters the driveway the first impression one gets is of an English cottage, the kind our imaginations build – the grey day and the well-manicured lawn enhance the ‘atmosphere’.
The spacious sit-out is an extension that was made to accommodate the car porch, Jacob says. In the past the entrance faced the road but it was later moved to the left side of the house after the car porch was built. The other change is an entrance (a door) into the house which has been cemented and closed. Other than that no major changes have been made to main structure, he adds.
The house was built when Joseph Thaliath was based in Thiruvananthapuram. The family moved into the house a long time after its construction as the family was based in the capital city. It moved in 60 years ago.
The family belongs to Puthenpally near Varapuzha. “I believe it took more than a couple of years to build the house. The bricks that built the house came from Puthenpally, by boat,” Jacob says. “Those days there was nothing in Ernakulam but there was a lot of activity around areas such as Paravur.” The arterial MG Road had just come into existence, there was one railway station (the old railway station) and there was Market Road.
From inside, the house is quite unlike the houses built in Kerala during that period. It does not open to a large room. If houses were to be assigned personalities then this house would be an introvert. From the drawing room there is no way of guessing what the rest of the house is like. The drawing room is a spacious, naturally well-lit with plenty of large, arched windows which lets in light. An octogenarian radio occupies the pride of place, “it doesn’t work. It is more of curio now,” Jacob says. The wooden rafters on the ceiling have been reinforced with bigger, thicker wood rafters for support as the original ones had started sagging. The ceiling is not concrete but a mixture of Kurdis tiles and lime.
A narrow corridor from the drawing room goes into the house. A painting of the late Joseph Thaliath dominates it. Rooms with arched doorways flank the corridor - a bedroom, a dining room and a kitchen. The mosaic flooring gleams like a mirror, “the flooring was clay tiles but it was changed to mosaic many years ago,” Jacob says. It is rarely that houses of this vintage in Kerala have arched doorways and windows. Jacob says, “It was fashionable in the United Kingdom in those days.” An arch even supports the beams in the dining room.
What used to be an open passage led to the main kitchen, which occupies the rear part of the building. The kitchen is huge by current standards and is still in use. It has an old world charm, not the kind one expects to see in a city today.
A staircase leads to the first floor. The tile flooring in the rooms on the first floor is intact. To make the room AC-compatible, a false ceiling has been added under the original wood ceiling.
The bathrooms have been modified, in fact one of the rather spacious bathrooms has been converted to a walk-in wardrobe. Some of the fittings, especially the fans, date back several decades and are in perfect working condition.
Like well-to-do houses of the time there is a cowshed and hen pen. The cow shed has been converted to house Jacob’s wife’s tailoring unit. The family had cows till the not too distant past, Jacob says.
A house this old needs regular maintenance and the Thaliaths are doing a good job of it. A remarkable feature of the house is that it makes use of natural light and is cool.
Time has done its work on Thaliath house, but the house has gracefully weathered change and lives on.
