This 120-Year-Old Bungalow in India Was Lovingly Restored by the Former Maharaja’s Grandchildren

The bedrooms at this bungalow in Mysore, India, draw color inspiration from the region’s winged inhabitants. One is painted the soft ochre of a yellow-throated bulbul; another, the many blues of an Indian roller; and a third is the winsome white and pink of a painted stork. The homeowners are inveterate birdwatchers, and Mysore, home to one of the region’s best-known bird sanctuaries, gave designer Shruti Jaipuria of MAIA Design Studio no shortage of avian inspiration.

Aditya Guru Dev and Samyukta Lakshmi—grandchildren of the erstwhile Maharaja of Mysore—acquired a bungalow with good bones and a slowly failing roof. When work began in 2019, the plan was to turn it into a four-bedroom boutique accommodation, somewhere guests could stay inside old Mysore. “When you go to cities like this, you want to experience them for what they are; you don’t necessarily want to stay in a cookie-cutter hotel that could be anywhere in the world,” Jaipuria says. “We wanted people to experience Mysore in an authentic and rooted way, through the architecture, interiors, and crafts of the region.” At some point during the restoration, however, the family had a change of heart and decided to keep it for themselves as a weekend home. Raj Vilas, as the bungalow in Mysore is now known, became their own retreat instead.

An Ambitious Revival

For the structure’s restoration, the family turned to conservation architect Sanjog Shetty, an old friend of Guru Dev’s. “Aditya had told me that whenever he would decide to renovate his property in Mysore, he would like me to be a part of the collaboration,” Shetty says. By the time he got the call, the building was structurally sound but showing its age everywhere else: rotted rafters under the tiled roof, tired window frames, lime cornices crumbling at the edges. Shetty stripped the building of later finishes and re-plastered it in lime mortar. His team dismantled the roof systems where they had to, replacing the timber that was too far gone, treating and reusing what was salvageable, and rebuilding the pitched roof with the same Mangalore tiles it had always had. Early-20th-century Basel Mission terra-cotta tiles were retained in select areas throughout the house. “Every aspect was important to maintain the character of the building,” Shetty says. “Without the authenticity of the construction technique, the restoration would have lacked the soul of what we were preserving.”

A Timeless Interior

Jaipuria’s vision for the interior was aligned: restore wherever possible, replicate otherwise, and don’t introduce anything overly anachronistic. “The client was very clear that we had to use as many original elements as possible,” she says. “Even new interventions were replicated to resemble the originals, such as the doors and windows, and the POP moldings replicated the originals in all of the rooms.”

The 120 year-old staircase was also retained, with only the railings on its landing built to match. Furniture was hunted down through antique dealers in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Kerala; pieces from Saanchi, Gulmohar Lane, Mahendra Doshi, and Accurate Antiques now sit under a stairwell skylight or anchor a sitting room, and each one has a distinct provenance.

The art and decorative objects across the home also have their own backstory. Digging through old family books, Jaipuria came across the Sri Tattva Nidhi, a compilation of art, music, and literary passages put together by Krishna Raja Wodeyar III, one of the Mysore maharajas. Framed reproduction prints from it now hang throughout the house. A trip to a doll museum in Koppal turned up Kinnala dolls, and the team bought enough to bedeck Raj Vilas. “These are wooden dolls made in the Koppal district of Karnataka, which is a 500-year-old craft cluster,” Jaipuria says. “We wanted each element in the project to tell a story and be relevant beyond aesthetics.”

The bathrooms and kitchen borrow from colonial design, with modern fixtures made to seem vintage set against Basel tile floors and brass fittings that look like they could have been there since the early 1900s. For Jaipuria, as for the client, it was important that comfort wasn’t sacrificed at the altar of traditional design.

None of this was the easy route. The family could have cleared out a decaying bungalow and built something simpler in its place. Instead, they spent years chasing down rafters worth saving, matching old joinery to the millimeter, and ensuring every intervention was sensitive to the original building construction. Most importantly, they found the right team whose ethos aligned. “We don’t have to demolish old buildings,” Shetty says. “They can be given a new lease of life and made functional.”

Styling: Samir Wadekar