COONOOR COONOOR COONOOR COONOOR COONOOR COONOOR

SET IN THE NILGIRIS' SHOLA FORESTS, A MODERNIST TWOLEVEL HOUSE ETCHED INTO THE NATURAL SLOPE OF THE MOUNTAINSIDE, OF INTERIORS LAYERED WITH THE FINEST TEXTILES AND DECORATIVE ARTEFACTS SOUMYA KESHAVAN'S LIGHT-FILLED HOME SITS NEATLY AND QUIETLY BETWEEN THE WILD TREES AND THE TEA GARDENS.

- DIVYA MISHRA

With every kilometre you drive away from Coonoor’s town centre, you get closer to what this landscape might have looked like before humans inhabited it. The markers of civilization—roads, concrete, noise—fall away, and the intense, wild green of the Nilgiris’ shola forests takes over. Were it not for the tea gardens accompanying the climbing road, it would be easy to forget that the city is a mere 10-minute drive away.

Interior designer Soumya Keshavan’s home rests within this patchwork of tufted landscapes. When I ask whether her home is really named “Dun Roamin”, Keshavan smiles. Coonoor, she explains, holds on determinedly to its British founders’ vision of the town as a facsimile of their homelands. “I had also planned to hang up my boots when the house was ready, and be totally done with roamin’!” she adds laughing.

At the entrance to the plot stands a pine tree that local, fifth-generation landscapist Zakeer Zackaria dates back to the 1960s. For about 60 years, this arboreal reminder of foreign interventions grew in a fastchanging world, alongside terraced tea gardens and the Nilgiris’ own shola forestand-grasslands.

In 2021, Keshavan, who was in Coonoor for a work meeting, spotted the plot of land on which it stood and was transfixed. “I felt my heart stop,” Keshavan recalls.

Though she had been working in the area for more than a decade, it was the first time she contemplated building a home for herself there. “I got out of the car to take it in and quite forgot my meeting!” she says sheepishly.

That tree—approximately the same age as Keshavan herself—became a marker, both material and symbolic, of the kind of home the interior designer would build for herself. Not native, perhaps—both pine and tea were brought to Coonoor by the British—but now, naturalized.