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Rana prefers comfort
Interior designers have a habit of compartmentalising areas that make your home lose its sense of individuality, Designer Ranna Gill.
Designer Ranna Gill doesn’t believe in roping in interior designers to do up a fancy home. Her idea of a house is one that is not contrived and a reflection of the inhabitant’s personality. “Interior designers have a habit of compartmentalising areas that make your home lose its sense of individuality. So we decided to do up our home in Garden Estate ourselves. That’s why my house remains my comfort blanket even today,” says Gill.
The most beautiful homes, Gill believes, are one that are bohemian. So things flow into one another, making it look as if it was effortlessly done, giving it a relaxed ambience. The Gill home is certainly stylish and modern in interpretation, much like the designer herself. Her dog Simba (a boxer) and the fish Gill believes adds warmth to the lived-in house. The art ranges from T. Vaikuntham, to Om Prakash to Sanjay Bhattacharya, mirroring the designer’s great taste.
“Crystal from Lalique is passé, I prefer objects from Italian designer Piero Fornasetti who created decorative fashion items that never went out of fashion. His style was based on illusionism and architectural perspectives and he often used motifs like playing cards, fish and the sun to create vases, lamps and plates,” says Gill. So you see several Fornasetti pieces placed dexterously in the house without cluttering the living room.
The keen traveller picked up these items from on foreign sojourns. She likes Fornasetti for his minimalist work. “But my all time favourite are the works of painter Fang Xiang from Guangdong (China) who specialises in Chinese gardens and courtyards, depicting the era gone by, creating magic on the canvas. I picked these up from a gallery in Singapore,” elaborates Gill.
The understated drawing room is done in ivory. What makes it interesting is the adjoining quaint wooden study that boasts of 3,000 books of Urdu poetry.
“These books are collected by my father. Another passion that I share with my
father is watching old DVDs like the original Devdas (with Dilip Kumar). Some of the films in our library are as old as 70 years,” she announces.
Interestingly, the FIT, New York fashion graduate knows everything about boxer Mohammed Ali’s bouts, thanks to her father’s movie collection that traces his life history through films. And a visit to the Gill home can’t be complete without the coffee table books like the Griffin And Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantuck. “It reveals a touching love story through letters and postcards of a London postcard designer and a South Sea island artist. It’s a must read,” says Ranna. The palpable warmth coupled with eclectic knick-knacks is what makes Gill’s home unique.
