Despite popular perception, the walls of Kangana Ranaut’s home are not lined with the severed heads of her enemies. Instead, you’ll find pop prints, delicate ceramic plates and some inspirational quotes. An excerpt from the cover story of Architectural Digest India , featuring the moody yet bright abode of the Bollywood star, who will soon be stepping into the shoes of the Rani of Jhansi:
“So, what’s she like?” asked an excited friend, after my interview with Ranaut, expecting to be regaled with stories of drama and debauchery. Sadly for my friend, I had no such accounts. The acrtor is rather... normal — soft-spoken to the extent that I’m worried my recorder won’t pick up her voice; observant, pragmatic and, unusual for someone in her line of work, very self-aware.
Colour me happy
I enter the house through a bright blue door, which, she says, is a nod to her Himachali roots. “You know, there you have blue, green and orange houses with red doors, and it’s a very pretty sight, with a lot of accidental charm,” she says, laughing softly at the memory. “Like, in my ancestral home, one section is done up entirely in maroon — maroon walls, maroon tiles on the outside and white interiors.”
But coming around to an aesthetic of authenticity has been a process, and Ranaut admits to initially succumbing to the lure of “apparent” luxury. Her initial years in Mumbai were spent in a one-room apartment in Versova — a neighbourhood popular with the species known as ‘Bollywood strugglers’. After the success of Fashion in 2008, and then Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai in 2010, she bought an apartment in a Santacruz high-rise, which, design-wise, bore the stamp of her sudden wealth. “I had new money, and my only instruction to the designer then was that he use the most expensive stuff ever,” she says sheepishly, adding, “But after a while, it started to feel like a hotel. As actors, we travel a lot, and stay at five- and seven-star hotels, and coming back to another five-star felt too cold and sanitised.”
She acquired this four-bedroom, fully-furnished apartment with “the most expensive” marble floors in 2013, and then “broke everything down because, while it was very beautiful, it had no originality or any sense of belonging”. “I’m a mountain girl, and I wanted a bit of mountain flavour, with a lot of greenery and colour.” The house, with interior designer Richa Bahl’s help, now features rustic-looking walls, wooden beamed ceilings and slate tiles on the floor, “like in my great grandmother’s ancestral house”, Ranaut adds happily.
Break time
The structural changes essentially comprised combining two of the bedrooms into one, which is now Ranaut’s bedroom and dressing room; and what was once a swimming pool is now a garden, because, “I felt really guilty about wasting so much water in a city like Mumbai,” she says. Now, seen through the drawing room’s large windows is the lovingly tended garden that splashes the house with greenery in the mess of concrete that is the Maximum City.
In one corner of the drawing room is a small temple, which Ranaut designed herself. “My idea of a perfect house is a place that takes me closer to my roots while I look into my future,” she says, running her fingers through the fur of her German Spitz, Pluto, who is unselfconsciously lolling around on the Andrew Martin sofa next to her.
Scattered through the home are quirky frames, artefacts, art photographs, and room dividers with artwork inspired by famous women artists. “I like gung-ho women,” says Ranaut, her careful and quaint choice of words inexplicably charming. What is conspicuously absent, though, is a clear connection to her line of work. There are no awards on proud display, no movie posters, no dismaying propensity for blown-up self-portraits (a sad truth in many film stars’ homes). Ranaut is clear about separating the professional from the personal; and this house, to her, is undeniably personal.
Read the full version of the interview in Architectural Digest India ’s May-June 2017 issue. Photographs courtesy Simon Watson / Architectural Digest
