French Connection

Architect Niels Schoenfelder and his entrepreneur wife Malavika Shivakumar designed their Chennai home to reflect their Indo-European roots.

- Sunil Sethi

Despite a scattering of swanky new residential high-rises and theme parks with names like ‘Oceanique’, ‘Ecstasea’ and ‘Dizee World’, the road south from Chennai to Kovalam still retains remnants of a rural setting. It is down one such seaward lane that German architect Niels Schoenfelder has built a home for his family.

The frontage presents a bare expanse of white wall with a deliberately uninviting steel door that opens outwards. To step inside, however, is to suspend belief. You enter a large dining space, with its floor of waxed black Kadappa stone and whimsical art deco dining table. Here onwards, surprise after unexpected surprise lies in store. The low-slung building gives on to a walled courtyard with raked yellow sand in Zen garden-like symmetry.

Beyond lies the two-storeyed main house, its central double-height living area soaring to a pitched roof, and walls of birch ply, stained deep blue with natural indigo. The eye travels upwards from an innovative steel bookcase of Schoenfelder’s design to an ingenious “bridge of books”. This links the master bedroom to a large walk-in area that he teasingly calls “my lady’s boudoir”.

A MEETING OF MINDS

Tall, lanky, 41-year-old Schoenfelder, an alumnus of the 19th-century Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, comes from a rigorous intellectual tradition. Though he describes his Hannover upbringing as “quite mundane”, it’s no coincidence that as the only child of educationists in French literature and art history, his outlook was shaped by a liberal world view: “Our holidays were spent in far-flung places like China or Chile.” After a stint in Paris working for a small architectural practice, he fetched up in Puducherry in 2002 to work on a couple of boutique hotels—and never left.