This Alibag holiday home is a Wunderkammer of eclectic objects
Trust Farah Ahmed Mathias and Dhaval Shellugar to pull a rabbit out of the hat when attempting something new. Or multiple at once, if their latest masterstroke, a 21,000-square-foot Alibag holiday home, is anything to go by. Unencumbered by a specific style or aesthetic, it isn’t, as Mathias puts it, “confined by a concept.” And, as one quick sweep of the casa proves, it isn’t bedevilled by it either. When it came to designing the larger-than-life estate for a joint family of restaurateurs, Mathias and Shellugar, the co-founders and principals of Bengaluru-based multidisciplinary collective FADD Studio, were mindful of optimising the striving envelope, executed by Vandana and Ranjit Sinh of Mumbai-based Ranjit Sinh Associates, both by scale and signature. They resorted to using a layered approach, mining objects from across the length and breadth of the country, and some from far beyond. So much so, that the pair agrees that the resultant aesthetic lexicon “needs to be experienced to be felt,” and, in what some may dismiss as hyperbole, but the pair clarifies is patently not, that “the volume needs to be heard, the air tasted, the colours touched, and the space seen, for it all to make sense.”