Amit�€™s bar

Oh to be rich in Delhi! To have a palatial home and a sprawling farmhouse and the wealth to stuff them both with antiques and art! Why spend it on anything else? Art not only flaunts your wealth, it announces to your dinner guests how very cultured you are and, more importantly, how rich.

This is a story about a piece of furniture which belongs to Amit, who lives about 30 minutes from where Gandhi’s spinning loom sits enshrined as a symbol of Indian austerity. He did frightfully well in housing development and, as is the Delhi way, he wanted his friends to know it. So he decided to build a dream home, an expression of his high taste and even higher income. Typically, he engaged a design firm for the task—in this case, the House of Raro, run by two pretty sisters from a similarly wealthy family down the street. They set about designing Amit’s every room and detail. And the final piece, la piece if you will, has just been delivered— perhaps the purest expression of Amit’s urge to entertain his friends with his opulence. This is the story of Amit’s bar.

“It’s taken nine months,” says Rajita Gupta, the eldest of the Raro sisters, showing me around her showroom in Sainik farms. “From conceptualisation, design, sourcing the materials and jewellery—everything. It’s like 14-feet long, nearly four-foot high, and it’s been inlaid with 1,600 pieces of bison horn. We’ve used nearly three kilos of sterling silver for the top, with 6,200 zirconium diamonds, and at the ends, we’re going to put 300 carat black onyx rings— the same onyx that Cartier use in jewellery.”

It’s too much to take in all at once—it’s a luxury landslide. Rajita describes her pieces as a permutation of animal parts, exotic countries and design terminology. For instance, “we’ve used Rajasthani camelbone for the inlays”, or “this is a Frank Michel chair in stingray leather from Thailand.” Sometimes the animal parts are substituted for precious metals or timbers. Ebony, for instance, is a particular fetish. “Mozambique ebony is the hardest, strongest wood known to man—it also has a high natural oil content so it doesn’t need the veneers that other wood need,” she says. “The darker the wood the better, basically—it goes African, then Macassar ebony from Indonesia, and then rosewood.”

That African ebony costs a fortune needn’t be said at this point. House of Raro has a habit of making furniture out of materials that others use for jewellery. Like ebony—it’s so expensive, it’s been used in earrings. When it comes to furniture, it’s mostly used as a veneer, if at all. But at the House of Raro, they make whole beds and tables out of the stuff.

There’s no ebony in Amit’s bar, though. His was a bespoke piece, not to be found in either of the Raro showrooms in Delhi (Sainik farms) or Colaba, Mumbai. As is typical of clients of this kind, his brief to Rajita was simple—“just make me something really special, money’s no object.” So they dreamed up a bar with a full shagreen (stingray leather) finish, lumpy with serpentine silver attachments, each one jewelled to the nines. “It’s extravagant, I know,” says Rajita, “but at the high end, that’s what sells. The rich want their furniture to look like old money, and in Delhi, it has to look expensive. That whole understated elegance, modernist thing doesn’t work.” It took a month to come up with the sketches, a “mood board” and a rough budget—Rs 1.5 crore. But even Amit balked at that price.

So the girls returned to their studio, and produced plan B. “An Egyptian Art Deco story,” says Rajita. “We were inspired by a Cartier clutch that had the Goddess Maat in diamonds on it. So we proposed these big black Onyx panels with a diamond palm tree and leopard, and a big sapphire and diamond bracelet along the top. That came to Rs 90 lakh.” A bargain! But yet again Amit balked. It’s just a bar!

In the end, he went with Plan C which comes in at a price neither Amit nor Rajita are comfortable revealing—“let’s just say it was substantially cheaper than plan B”. Not that cheap is the appropriate word in this case—bison horn is far from inexpensive. The girls first came across the stuff in London and came back with a cartload. “It’s about Rs 1,200 per square foot, and it has never been used in furniture before. Usually, it’s used for buttons and ashtrays, small stuff. So we gave it to the guy who does our inlays and started heating it and flattening it out and then cutting it into squares to stick down onto the wooden frame of the piece. It’s very difficult. It expands in the heat, so one out of every three pieces you stick down starts to come up again. And again you have to plane it, grind it, level it—it smells like burning hair.”

Once the pieces are stuck down, they must be immediately sealed with clear lacquer, otherwise contact with the air will make it decompose. But the results are stunning, the colours alone—everything from black to flesh pink, a wash of mauves and blues along the way. And the surface of the bar, a sparkling landscape of zirconium diamonds, inset into crafted silver tiles.

I associate bars with spillage and cigarette ash, not diamonds and silver. But I’m a journalist, not an industrialist. I occupy a different universe. The House of Raro excels in addressing the particular fancies and needs of the super rich since it’s a world the sisters grew up in.

The Raro story started when the girls left college in the mid-’90s, one a graduate in fashion design, the other in interiors. They noticed an opportunity in high-end bespoke furniture. At the time, the business was all about knock-offs—housewives with no training, no showroom and no experience, who had their craftsmen copy what they saw in Architectural Digest. So they set up a furniture company and travelled the world on a factfinding mission—all through Europe, to Australia and the East, examining designs, and sourcing materials. At a time when most furniture manufacturers in India were using the same tanneries that provided shoe uppers, the Raro girls were examining the finest leather work in Italy, and falling in love with Art Deco, the extravagant creations of the likes of Emile Ruhlmann.

“When we came back, we borrowed Rs 10 lakh from our father,” says Rajita, “and made a small collection of 60 pieces which we exhibited at the Hyatt in Delhi over two days. It was the 15th August weekend, 1997. And we sold nothing! People thought, ‘these girls must be con artists, their father must be a smuggler.’ They couldn’t understand why these two giggly little girls were charging Rs 3 lakh for a sofa!”

But they were at the cusp of a boom—the markets were opening, billionaires were being made and ostentation was on the march. Today, the orders pile up at the Raro studio in Delhi. It’s all word of mouth at this level. Amit came to the girls through a family recommendation. And the contracts keep coming. When you’re catering to the very top-end of the spectrum, you’re insulated from the winds of fashion— the air up there is different.

“Remember the bar is just part of his party room,” says Rajita, pulling out a new heap of sketches. “It’s a whole tone-on-tone story, with the walls cased in bull leather, and mirrored screens at the back. We’ve commissioned an artwork for the ceiling and the curtains are made of Hermes velvet…”

In the Raro universe, it’s as though the downturn never happened.