Tranquility and wonder on a coffee plantation in the Palani Hills of Tamil Nadu.
Click the button above to hear the Rajakkad soundscape
There are many sides to the life of Jeremy Fry. He was a brilliant engineer and inventor, successful businessman and entrepreneur, astute art collector, generous supporter of the arts and charitable donor, collector of extraordinary houses, and a visionary gardener. He was not always easy. Like many clever and successful people, he was self-opinionated, assertive and could be distant. His private life is best left under the duvet. But I, and many, many others, have reason to be grateful to him for creating Rajakkad.
The story starts in the mid-nineties. Jeremy is disappointed by England and no longer charmed by the Grand Banc, the abandoned hamlet he had bought and restored in the Luberon. He is divorced and has given up the family home with its fine formal garden. At the age of 66 he is restless and wants a new project. His cousin, the artist Tony Fry, is living in Cochin, the historic spice capital of the Malabar Coast, and suggests he visit. Jeremy is instantly seduced by the charms that woo so many who visit Kerala; the climate, the vegetation, the food, the people and the sophisticated multinational cultural group that Tony inhabits. Typical Jeremy, he doesn’t paddle, he dives . . . He buys a working estate, rebuilds the buildings and workers accommodation, and reorganises the business in a most un-Indian way.
He buys another estate called Rajakkad, (the king of the forest) which included a traditional Keralan house, big enough to be called a palace. The building is a vernacular tharavad, the single storey, courtyarded, house, typical of grander Keralan homesteads, built with perforated wood panelled dormers piercing the gable-ends to encourage air flow. Jeremy loves the house but decides it is in the wrong place; so he decides to move it. Typical Fry. To be sure it was a crazy idea but there is some mitigation. Firstly, these buildings are put together without nails or screws, being assembled like those 3D wooden puzzles I remember as a kid, and so can be deconstructed and put back together again. Secondly, Jeremy was the man for the job. A practical engineer with a fine eye for detail, a good manager and blessed with enviable sense of design and style; he could be relied upon to do it well. The building was moved – to a better location on higher ground.
But by this time Jeremy was falling foul of the Keralan authorities, who disapproved of his modus vivendi. He had taken on an assistant Robesh George, who was instructed to find yet a third site for the house in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu. This was quite a challenge as while Kerala has a flat coastal plain, once you travel inland you come across the great slabs of laterite that form the Ghats, the range of hills that run north south up the west coast. It wasn’t easy, but finally Robbie reported a potential site in a coffee plantation in the Palani hills, with just sufficient flat land for the house at the top of a crest, albeit at that time the land was still forested. Jeremy bought it unseen. Within a few weeks twenty-six trucks containing the components of the house ground up the steep escarpment through Kodikanal and onward to the new home. Days later the police arrived at the previous site in Kerala to find only the footings. Everything had gone including Jeremy and the house!
In essence these tharavads are roof structures, supported by hardwood partitions and columns, or by simple blockwork walls. The roof is machine made clay tiles. I have often wondered about this apparent disparity – modern tiles on ancient buildings – but reconcile it with the Portuguese influence in Kerala following Vasco di Gama’s arrival in Calicut as early as 1498. The buildings are shady and cool, with inner courtyards open to the sky with shallow pools. The floors are stone or terra cotta tiles. The doors are solid slabs of native hardwood.
Jeremy built dams to collect water, set up the necessary infrastructure, sorted out water and plumbing and commenced landscaping. Cunningly he realised he could fit simple showers and lavatories under the external eves of the eight larger rooms, to make bedroom suites. The whole was furnished with colonial style antique furniture, with a smattering of Hindu artefacts and works of art. Staff were recruited from the local village and taught to tend the garden.
Enter Francis Fry, Jeremy’s son. If Jeremy was a man of the twentieth century, (in previous eras he would have been imprisoned or murdered) Francis would have been happy in the previous one. A collector of anything and everything beautiful, a plantsman, an obsessional notator of his garden and planting, and carrying his enthusiasm like a nineteenth century planter, he is a colonial Kilvert, but with a singular aesthetic. Francis was able to spend his father’s final years with him in India and gradually took over the running of the house and developing the landscaping and planting.
The start point was a typical hill station growing coffee and black pepper. Both are shade loving plants, the coffee tree a low bush, the pepper a vine that clambers the trunks of other trees. A typical estate uses silver oaks, which grow fast and straight to support the vines, with jack fruit and silk cotton to provide shade. On the face of it the land looks like open planted woodland, until you realise the rationale behind the treescape. But Francis has added massively to this palate, not only with structural elements but also with an inspired range of plants both local and imported. His particular passion are cycads, which are well suited to the microclimate, and add geometric structure to the scruffy forest flora.
And this is where we now sit and take our breakfast, in a tranquil glade adjacent to the south side of the house with views over the shadowy mountains. The building sits perfectly in the forest setting. Even twenty yards away you can fail to notice the mellow tones of the roof tiles or browns and tans of the wooded frontage. The forest garden encroached up to the walls with informal paths to shady spaces where unobtrusive garden furniture provides settings for outdoor eating. The light is dappled, filtered by the canopy of foliage. Francis’ planting creates bursts of brilliant crimson or yellow amongst the indigenous trees.
But it is perhaps the soundscape that is most remarkable. The incessant bird call surprises and charms all who visit. We have no idea to what we are listening but have given the songsters nicknames: the boiling kettle bird, the squeaky bed bird, the sweet wrapper bird. The owners of these polyglot calls and shrieks are elusive in the dense foliage, but Sidan, one of the smiling staff, (who commenced work here several years ago as a boy) is brilliant at finding them, and knows all the proper names. Often monkeys need to be scared away from coming close to the house, in search of fruit or food. Giant squirrels languorously feed high in the canopy of massive trees.
Rajakkad is now a boutique hotel with Robbie’s role changed from concierge to hotel manager. One can be here in total privacy, or one can enjoin the other guests at the long table for dinner. One can walk or make day visits, or sit and read, awaiting the next delicious, largely vegetarian, meal. There is Francis’ library to explore with its unparalleled collection of books on India both fiction and non-fiction. One can paint or draw or chat or practice yoga on the forest platform. One can do lots or little. One can even – if so motivated – write a blog. And all in the delectable climate of the Western Ghats, those hills at three thousand feet famed by E.M Forster and others as being the perfect foil for the steam of the plains. Warm days, cooler nights without the need for air-conditioning. Perfect.
This is such a beautiful and remarkable place. It is redolent of a time past and yet also somehow timeless in its natural appeal and simple freshness. One can feel the pull of the hill stations that dragged colonial pioneers from the comforts of the home counties to the perils of the tropics. It is a privilege to be here, but equally the lifestyle is simple and homely. It seems a long way from the problems of the world that we left only a week ago in the voices of the radio and the pages of newspapers. It is marvellous and joyful, calming and restorative.
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