Aniket Bhagwat has built a unique practice that straddles the worlds of landscape and architecture

It looks almost out of place amidst the glittering tower blocks of Gurgaon. The unusual façade of the building is made from Corten steel which gives it a rusted, weather-worn look.

Be prepared for more surprises as you step through to the courtyard of the Sirpur Paper Mills building. The façade of one wing is built from custom-baked bricks that come in 15 different shapes and colours — the result is that it seems to almost bend and sway exuberantly. And at the far end, a free-standing wall, unattached to any part of the building, rises to the sky in solitary splendour.

This is a building that’s clearly in conversation with itself — and its users. It is, firstly, the corporate headquarters of Sirpur Paper Mills. But it stands out because it’s the home of one of the country’s first private museums run by leading art collector Anupam Poddar’s Devi Art Foundation.

Ever since Devi Art Foundation’s art museum opened, the accolades have poured in for both the art and the building that houses it. The building’s Ahmedabad-based architect Aniket Bhagwat modestly plays down the accolades but concedes “we’re hugely proud” of the building.

For Bhagwat, it was a complex design effort. It was not a simple remit to create “an indulgent art building” with an unlimited budget. It had to be both a corporate office and a stylish art museum.

In the Sirpur Paper Mills building, which houses Anupam Poddar’s Devi Art Foundation museum, one wall is made with bricks of different sizes and colours that create the impression that it is almost swaying

You could say that Ahmedabad-based Bhagwat was just the man for the job. He isn’t the biggest name in the architectural trade. But his creations stand out for being highly novel structures.

He inherited part of the business from his father Prabhakar Bhagwat, the doyen of landscape architecture. But in the last eight years, the son has moved the landscape architecture company into the mainstream and has come out with a slew of pathbreaking work.

Now, Bhagwat’s juggling a varied portfolio. He’s doing Anupam and Lekha Poddar’s next hotel, Deviratna, in Jaipur. There’s another hotel for them in Kerala too.

Then, there’s the landscape for the 262-acre Calcutta Riverside project at Batanagar. Moreover, he’s expanding his oeuvre beyond individual homes and is now creating three housing projects with a difference around Ahmedabad.

Bhagwat’s also working on a weekend resort in mud. “We’re going to try and say that mud can be extremely urban as a statement,” he says. Also on the drawing-board are three educational institutions.

Bhagwat didn’t really plan to combine landscape and architecture. “I’ve always stayed away from the idea of being this one single designer who does everything. Design is about many energies coming together,” he says.

But as projects came in, he says, “We started building an interesting portfolio that’s fairly unique because not too many firms in India are doing both landscape and architecture, doing both reasonably well and doing each project differently.”

Half Way Retreat, an industrialist’s weekend home designed by Bhagwat, has a varied landscape that includes agricultural land, groves and even a sunken pool

Anupam Poddar — the two became close friends after Bhagwat landscaped the Devigarh fort hotel — is all praise for the architect. “Aniket is clever about how he picks his projects so that he’ll learn something new from every one,” he says.

He chose Bhagwat for the Sirpur project because, he says: “I was intrigued by Aniket’s work as it was modern and yet timeless. His buildings were taking a step forward without being gimmicky. He’s respectful of material, of nature and of the people who’ll use the spaces.”

Architect Samira Rathod, who did the interiors on Bhagwat’s recent Jariwala House and Half Way Retreat (HWR) projects in Ahmedabad, believes Bhagwat’s work has an “unsurpassed rigour”. “There’s a fearlessness in Aniket. He’s not worried about others’ opinions or scared of failure. That self-confidence shines through his projects,” she says.

Bhagwat has used elements like wooden Parsi jaalis as walls and South Indian columns at Jariwala House in Ahmedabad

Nor does he shy away from challenges. The Sirpur building, for instance, went through two contractors because of its complexities. Finally Bhagwat took over himself and Poddar virtually became the “site supervisor”.

The two make a “great team” now, but it didn’t start like that. Bhagwat says he initially dismissed Poddar as a “spoilt rich kid” when they first met at Devigarh — until Poddar showed that he wouldn’t accept anything but the best.

“We were all standing looking down at what I’d planted in the lower court. Everyone was making polite noises. Then Anupam said, ‘I don’t know what’s the big deal, this looks like any cheap Delhi farmhouse.’ I could have thrown him from a 100ft down. But he made sense. So I thought about it for five minutes and then ripped it all apart,” recounts Bhagwat.

The Devigarh project was a “huge learning curve”. And in the Poddars, he found clients for whom “the idea of compromise doesn’t exist in design”.

Poddar too says, “One of the pleasures of working with Aniket is that he challenges and reinvents himself.” Moreover, the architect has an ability to reach out to the smallest person on site, says Rathod. It’s what makes him a great teacher too, she says.

The landscape design for the Devigarh luxury hotel was a “huge learning curve” for Bhagwat

Like his father, Bhagwat teaches at the Centre for Environment and Planning (CEPT), Ahmedabad. Indeed, he feels that teaching is extremely important. A strong “academic enquiry” fuels his practice too. He’s intellectually rigorous and is always, for instance, talking about how to define the ‘Indian Modern’.

“What does modernity mean in India? Is it always the borrowed idiom or can we find a design language that has evolved out of our understanding of our culture. That search is very important to our work,” he says.

Adds his wife Smruti, also an architect who’s closely involved in the practice: “Using crafts in architecture is also important to us.”

Bhagwat’s innovativeness has been on show on many occasions. He has, for instance, redefined Indian marriage spaces in first, the Aman wedding ground in 2000, and more recently in Aakash, with its stunning lighting landscape.

In Ghuma House, a weekend home outside Ahmedabad, among his first landscape-plus-architecture projects, he explored the “rural modern”. Actually, Bhagwat first imagined what this barren land would have been “had the town not consumed it”. From there grew the stunning house located on the edge of a water pond, flanked by a forest with fields in the background.

Or take HWR, an industrialist’s weekend home. HWR has a varied landscape that ranges from agricultural land to groves. Bhagwat says, “We wanted to build a modern Indian house using Indian materials. Yet, it’s an extremely elegant statement and not a rustic one.”

In Aakash, an Ahmedabad wedding ground, Bhagwat has designed a stunning lighting grid

In Jariwala House, Bhagwat explored the “Ahmedabad Modern”, using elements like wooden Parsi jaalis as walls and South Indian columns that yet “sit comfortably with each other”.

Now, in the upcoming 200,000sqft Deviratna hotel, Smruti says: “We’re exploring what’s the modern feudal architecture of Rajasthan.”

Bhagwat actually became an architect by default. “I was a bad student, and architecture seemed like a natural choice,” he states. So he “stumbled” through architecture school at CEPT. “Then, landscape architecture seemed like the logical next stumble,” he adds. While studying this at Delhi School of Planning, though he “decided to clean up my act”. The result: he topped his class.

When he returned home in 1986-87, Bhagwat knew the town had dismissed “Bhagwat’s son” as no good. “The desire to prove myself was very strong,” he says.

So he worked “like a maniac”, doing 40 landscape projects a year. But by 1992, he says, “I didn’t have any work to show”, either because a mediocre architecture didn’t highlight his landscape or clients didn’t maintain them.

But India was witnessing an industrial boom then with firms like Reliance Industries doing projects in Hazira. “We were the landscape firm on the scene so we got hired for all of it,” he says.

By 1995, though, Bhagwat began to feel his work “was about scale and not design”. So he decided to focus on quality. The office was starved of work for three years. “It was stupid. But I knew things would work out,” he says.

Then, three projects — Ghuma House, Devigarh and Aman — turned the tide. Now, Bhagwat’s in a position to pick and choose.

He’s ensuring that each project is unique in some way. For instance, there’s the suburban housing project for the Safal group, where he will do 80 bungalows over 25-odd acres of mango orchard without cutting a single tree.

For developer Abhishree Ecostead, Bhagwat’s doing weekend homes on a 300-acre plot. But this isn’t about “contrived” picket fences and lawns. Rather, each house will sit on a waterway and have a farm and a little orchard that’s part of a conti-nuous orchard band running through the property.

Bhagwat’s continuing with individual homes too like the one for an industrialist in Baroda, which sits on two hills and overlooks a forest. Here he has designed a steel ramp that snakes through the house and goes back into the forest.

In every project they do, says Bhagwat, “We try and ask different questions. We don’t always succeed in answering them. But the least I can say is that we make a very honest attempt.”