The House Collector

He stores whole mansions in his warehouses. Might give them to you, for a price, if he likes you

If, as Asian Paints says, every colour says something about a home and its occupants, then paints are saying scary things about many Keralites. All across the state, from Kozhikode to Thiruvananthapuram, there are homes awash in strawberry pink, sky blue, even magenta, nonsense wall colours that painfully clash with the tropical green countryside around them. Buckets of repatriated dirhams and dollars have produced a trippy Cartoon Network-inspired Legoland in which anything bright, shiny or kitsch is beautiful. By his own admission, it is 72-year-old businessman Kamaluddin Musaliar’s worst nightmare come true.

Member of a prominent Keralite family, Musaliar lives in the heart of Kollam—a trading port district about 70 km north of Thiruvananthapuram. Around his vast modernist home, with a wood-panelled living area, colonial-style furniture and intricate tapestries, you can pick up clues of the man’s tastes. You understand that he likes well-crafted, historical pieces like the Favre Leuba weight clock on the foyer wall and the 40-year-old .30 Winchester gun (that only comes out in election years when the local police takes it into custody); that he prefers the feel of hardwood, and the layered sound of vinyl. But nothing in his restrained home gives away Musaliar’s real passion, or its magnitude.

Since 1984, this Kishore Kumar fan has managed to source what has to be the single largest collection of turn-of-the-century Kerala homes anywhere. In multiple warehouses, Musaliar has timber, furniture, roofs and many other parts of some of the best examples of the state’s glorious architectural past, when hardwood-bound houses were planned and erected by men best described as scientific architects. He has a soft spot for the wooden homes of the erstwhile Travancore state, which included southern Kerala and southern-most parts of Tamil Nadu.

In pre-Asian Paints Kerala, joint families lived in a tharavad, or family home. Even the smallest of these homesteads called naalukettu, built around a courtyard flanked by four pillars, were majestic pieces of art constructed with sturdy local material like jackwood timber, granite and clay. The architects balanced vaastu considerations with practical concerns about keeping out rain and heat, and storing grains. Carpenters used indigenous skills to cut and join pieces of wood so precisely that they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, minus nail or glue. “In a pointed roof for instance, each slat is slanted, they all fit together because the carpenter took into consideration even the smallest change in angle,” says Musaliar. Pillars were intricately carved, while a roof structure—Musaliar’s favourite appendage—of a multi-storey house was itself about the size of a small dwelling. But, because every part was held together mathematically, and as though their creators knew they’d have to be taken apart to survive, these old homes are remarkably simple to dismantle. Which is why one would call Musaliar a collector of houses rather than just antiques.

As romantic as they are, the tharavad homes are high-maintenance, and because they were built to be temperate in a ruthlessly hot climate, the interiors are dark and suffocating. So by the 1980s, when Musaliar began hunting for them, many such homes had already disappeared, their matured wood slashed and sold as scrap. Once torn down, the land was either parcelled and sold separately, or re-ordained with mauve monsters with wash-and-wear tile roofs and marble floors. Musaliar started out by going to potential sellers and asking them point-blank if they would give up their houses to him instead of breaking them apart for the local carpenter—he admits he’s had many uncomfortable conversations. Now he depends on a network of finders who tell him what’s going where. If a house catches his interest then he’ll take everything on the block, from roof to clocks.

Around Kerala, the name Thangal Kunju Musaliar, or simply TKM, represents a business family with interests in everything from cashew nuts to premier educational institutions. The name belongs to Musaliar’s late father, whose success in the cashew-processing industry seeded an empire now managed by many of his 12 offspring. Musaliar is the secretary of the TKM College Trust, which runs the colleges and schools his father founded.

In their base camp of Kollam the progressive Muslim family owns large tracts of land, including an old Wellworth pipe yard. The disused factory is another pad for the Musaliar collection, of which every piece of wood and bolt is documented. “The inventory is catalogued such that we know exactly what part it is and which house each item belongs to.”

Musaliar has never sold any part of his collection, but for certain quality customers. He would like to design and build old-style homes that use his antique building material as well as furniture and accessories. To showcase the overall effect, Musaliar and his engineer son Faizal have constructed three striking sample cottages on a Kollam waterfront property, that infuse old materials and modern engineering with contemporary considerations. Each cottage is 400 sq ft, built for about Rs 6,000 per sq ft using his old timber. Despite its wood exterior, sunlight floods into the airy rooms and there’s enough headroom for a contemporary six-footer to stand up straight.

Though the show houses are relatively cheap, the Musaliars say a larger structure with complicated carpentry would cost up to Rs 15,000 per sq ft. An exorbitant projection, but they believe clients should see it as an investment. “These houses can be taken apart and rebuilt anywhere, so unlike concrete homes these will live forever, and they’re hardwood,” says Faizal. There was a time in Kerala when common people were not permitted to use teak, because it was considered royal timber. Today, good quality teak and other hardwoods are rare and prohibitively expensive. So Musaliar’s collection of hardwoods, some of which are over a century old and have another 200 years of life left, are invaluable.

In MT Vasudevan Nair’s 1957 Malayalam novel Naalukettu, protagonist Appuni spends his early childhood enchanted by tales of the tharavad he’s barely seen. But once he manages to buy the house of his dreams, there’s little joy in his acquisition. Most Keralites have the same emotional plotline when it comes to their ancestral homes: some reminisce over its sepia images on the cover of a family history log, others are desperate for a lilac one-storey with half the running cost of a naalukettu. At least some of the old souls in Musaliar’s warehouses will have a more optimistic second innings, even if as smaller versions of what they once were.

architectureheritageKerala