Inside an artist’s 100-Year-Old Bandra bungalow with Portuguese roots

In Bandra, she lives in an old bungalow called Maudestan and works out of her childhood apartment a short drive away. Between these two addresses and the weaving town of Balaramapuram in Kerala, she is building a practice that threads together cloth, community and memory.

Finding Maudestan

When Lakshmi first found Maudestan, it wasn’t for a home. For the first two and a half years, this was her studio. “My brief to the broker was very clear,” she says. “I wanted a lot of light, a lot of nature, a lot of quiet. And he kept reminding me, this is Bandra, most of what you’re saying is not realistic.”

The three-storey bungalow is part of the Salsette Catholic Housing Society, a protected pocket of old Bandra with neighbours who’ve lived here for generations. The building is almost a hundred years old, with roots going back to the Portuguese settlement and a later 999-year lease under the British to protect community land. You still see traces of that everywhere—Portuguese azulejos tiles with the name Maudestan painted on them, a hand-painted Christ on old blue-and-white tiles at the porch and the small figurine of a soldier mounted outside to indicate that someone from the house once served in the colonial army. 

Living With Other People’s Art

Most of the walls in this room are occupied by art and Lakshmi is clear that she likes living with other people’s work as much as her own. A long black-and-wood library unit runs along one side, filled with novels, art history and philosophy and in the central bay hangs a length of kasavu from her own practice, mounted like a scroll.

Opposite this is a large work by Vivek Vilasini. A digitally constructed collage with Kathakali dancers, the Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge poster as well the Maruti logo and a copy of Malayala Manorama. The piece is a nod to Richard Hamilton’s famous collage on modern living rooms but re-roots it in a Kerala imagination. It’s the kind of playful, layered nostalgia that makes Lakshmi quietly happy every time she walks past it. It faces the curved dining nook, so family meals always happen under its gaze.

Some of the most important works in her personal collection are by artists she has encountered through her own journey. There is a lenticular work by Jitish Kallat, a roti that becomes a moon as you move around it, which he gave her during the years she worked in his studio. There is also a work by Bose Krishnamachari.

Her collection extends beyond these mentors. There is an etching by T. Venkanna, chosen from a phase of his practice she connected to strongly. A delicate, emotional work by Al Qawi Tazal Nanavati—constructed from letters written to the artist’s late mother on paper made from her sari, and a work by Ganga Devi, the Madhubani painter whose depiction of community and narrative drew her in when she first saw it.

Beyond the main living room is a den that shifts the register slightly. Here, the furniture is more relaxed—a deep wine sofa, a patterned rug, rattan and wood chairs —and the art turns cheekier. There are works by the anonymous street artist Tyler, collected by her husband; Ai Weiwei skateboards with his unmistakable raised middle finger; and even a drawing by a child from a workshop she once taught, kept because the child had sketched his portrait with such ingenuity.

Weaving Text, Code and Cloth

Lakshmi describes her practice as “the history, heritage and politics of the body and the cloth in terms of community, caste, gender and cultural landscape”. Over the years this has led her from intimate tributes to her grandmother to large-scale, text-heavy works that pull kasavu out of its ceremonial corner and into contemporary conversations.

One of the clearest examples of how she thinks is a recent private commission for a company, where she worked with Jacquard punch cards and the basic language of genetics. She took the four letters of the human genome—A, C, G and T—and had them woven straight into kasavu, letting the cloth carry the code as a repeated pattern. The work sits somewhere between textile, data visualisation and devotional cloth, holding together early computing, weaving technology and the idea that our bodies carry histories long before we choose what to wear.

However precise her drawings or digital mock-ups, the loom always has the final say. “We have to remember that, however much we try, I’m never going to get the precision of how I’ve drawn or digitally imagined something,” she says. “And that’s what I love… There is a certain magic that unfolds on the loom.” She is careful to frame her role as collaborator rather than saviour; revenues are structured so that a substantial share flows back to the weavers and younger members of the community are drawn into research, documentation and production so that the skill isn’t trapped in a single generation.