Reviews & Comments

*Inside Outside June 2000

[ ] has had a keen interest in Goan architecture for several years. As a child he often visited Goa, thanks to his father's postings there as a naval officer. He had always wanted to buy and restore a property in Goa, with the aim of living in it in the future. In the mid nineties, aged 26, he began the search m earnest. He says, 'Whenever we came to Goa on holiday, my wife would go to the beach while. I "would roam the countryside looking for old houses! I enjoyed these searches thoroughly, as I got to know some of the most charming and interesting places in the area.' He chanced upon Siolim House while driving by one day.

It had been built during the 17th century in the double-storeyed Casa de Sobrado style, around a central courtyard, very much like houses of the Portuguese nobility.

Siolim House was situated on the border of Bardez county, near lands that were subject to frequent attacks by the armies of Adil Shah, the Sultan of Bijapur, who sacked the territories of Bardez and Bijapur in 1654 and 1659, the Maratha troops of Sambhaji who attacked the county, and raids by the Ranes, a military aristocracy who dominated the lands beyond the borders. Rich landowners were frequently the victims of such raids, and Siolim House was not spared. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was relative stability and the family prospered. They built a chapel outside the house as a testimony to their power and importance.

Even though [ ] had no idea whom the house belonged to, he decided that it was going to be his! ""Finding the owners was like finding a needle in a haystack,1 he says. Only a son, now aged 75 and a daughter in her 90s, remained. They had sold the house, a few years ago, to a Swiss-American doctor living in USA. It took [ ] all of six months to find him and he says, 'Without any references except the city he had lived in five years ago, and his name, I was able to trace and find him in California!' Siolim House had weathered several of Goa's merciless, lashing monsoon rains and was now in a terrible state of disrepair. There were huge holes in the roof and the walls and timber were badly damaged. The rear portion had suffered structural damage and a large part of the roof had fallen in.

Once [ ] had acquired the house, he immediately undertook emergency repairs. With the help of a local architect who carried out the civil work, the restoration began. 'The brief was simple as there was very little scope for creativity. The house was to be brought back to its original splendour, while allowing for modern living,' says [ ] . He has taken great care with the restoration and insisted on using traditional materials and craftsmanship, like oyster shell window panes and pure shell and lime wall plaster. Most people could not understand this, as cement, which has the advantage of being readily available, was at least four times cheaper. I however knew the resilience and anti-bacterial properties of lime plaster made of crushed shells and no amount of persuasion could change my mind.'

Since the restoration was carried out with a view to making Siolim House his home, [ ] has been extremely generous with the space. Originally a 24-room house, it now has only seven bedrooms, named after major sea ports in the world - Macao, Cambay, Bahia, Malacca, Surat, Malabar and Damao. The other rooms have been converted into bathrooms, service areas and public areas. No walls were broken except for the one around the courtyard to open it up. The open corridor around it is now paved with terracotta tiles and set with wrought-iron furniture. This is where guests have their meals alfresco. The gardens are immaculate yet 'casually' laid out, with frangipani ([ ] favourite) growing harmoniously near pepper plants! In an arbour, sheltered by lush passion fruit creepers, is a spot that is perfect for quiet reflection and reverie and soaking in the atmosphere. A jewel-like lap pool in the centre, is the only obviously modern luxury.

Says [ ] , 'Converting Sioiim House into a 'hotel de charme' was an afterthought when we realised that welcoming guests would help us keep Sioiim House in perfect shape, and give to it the character that comes from being lived in. We still have difficulty using the word hotel, and would have done away with it entirely if it were not a key search word on the internet!' Siolim House is marketed only via the internet.
Varun has, in the process of fulfilling his dream, created with 'love and traditional materials', a retreat with soul! .

*Lesley Gillilan - Imperial bedrooms - Guardian Unlimited - 24/10/04.

Among treasured souvenirs of my first visit to India in 1989,1 have a battered guide to Goa, complete
with blotting-paper map and quaint descriptions of the former Portuguese colony ("a picture of verdant fertility ... the bounteous natural scenary [sic] and pleasant cli-mate infuse the tourist with a sense of peace and quietitude").
I took it with me when I made my fourth trip there in September, but although the map was useful, the guide proved hopelessly out of date. Indeed, it listed only four guesthouses in Candolim and three in Baga, but both places - once small fishing villages - are now swamped by new developments. Calangute, nearby, which was always relatively crowded (10 hotels are listed in my old I guide), now has a high street with traffic jams plus Boo Boo's Pub and internet cafes. Parts of Goa have certainly be-come more mainstream.

Independent travellers pre-pared to pay a little more for luxuries (not just air-condi-tioning, but empty beaches, unspoilt countryside, solitude, real Goan culture), should head for one of the boutique or "heritage" hotels, the majority of which are in the more popu-lated areas of northern Goa 

At any price, it is hard to get away from rock-hard coir mattresses (a south Indian speciality), car horns, two-stroke engines and barking dogs. And after staying in seven hotels on the trot, it was difficult not to grimace when the house special-ity turned out to be yet another Goan fish curry. But the quality and variety of the accommoda-tion restored my faith in the old Goan magic.

Siolim House Wadi Siolim, Bardez

The 300-year-old manor house (home to the governor of Macau during Portuguese rule) is owned by businessman [ ] , who bought it in 1996 as a roofless ruin. Three years on, his painstaking restoration won a Unesco award for conservation. The rooms: There are seven, which range from spacious to vast, with lofty ceilings, bath-rooms larger than most hotel bedrooms, polished, tiled and wooden floors, antique furni-ture and tall windows, some glazed with Goan oyster shell. There is also a pool, pretty gardens, and a shady pillared courtyard, a TV-room-cum-library and a superb team of staff (nothing is too much trouble). There is no restaurant, but home-cooked meals are served to order. What's nearby? Non-touristy

Siolim village is on the doorstep. Other attractions include the cathedral-like St Anthony's church and country walks through quiet lanes to the fishing quays of the Chapora river. The beaches at Morjim and Arambol are 10 minutes' drive away.

How  much? B&B from £35pp per night. Seven-day BB&D packages including taxes and airport transfers from £335pp. To book: +9822 584560 or 07951021027, siolimhouse.com.

*Financial Times March 5 / March 6 2005

Rags and riches in glorified Goa
Flower children age ungracefully in India's pretty coastal state, writes Justine Hardy

They call them 'raggy-taggys', with that Goan knack for finding words both onomatopoeic and visual for everything from bhang to crocheted bikinis - the latter being 'ladee teabags'. There are those who say these raggy-taggys are part of a modern malaise that has hit just about every sun'n'sand strip in south-east Asia.

Goa, India's west coast tourist trap, was perhaps the first to be infected by the hippy crowd. Its palm fringes were hemp heaven in the dog-end of the 1960s for kids rolling their nirvana between Rizlas while John, Paul, George and Bingo were rolling out the mantras with the Maharishi beside the banks of the Ganges in Rishikesh.

The flower babies stayed on in Goa, their every trait the antithesis of Paul Scott's veranda-entrenched remnants. These New Age hangers-on just got older, their skin resembling the wrinkled red earth on which they built their bars, their chill-out lounges and their beach huts.

In Goa, the ladees in tea-bags are represented by a certain kind of traveller. They are that snobbish variety that snarls if you call them tourists, who laugh at the cleanliness of your clothes, sneer at you for staying in a hotel with a nightly rate that would keep thorn in dope for months and despise you for not getting into their version of the "real" India.

Perhaps they are right. There are those who live happily in trancelike states for decades at a time, but in the haze of passing time they lose the ability to see themselves as they really are They do not have to watch their own downward -Spiral of drug use and disangement, and cannot see the irony in the fact that they wear a uniform - the dreadlocks, the piercings, the tattered tie-dye - like the drudging classes they claim to have rejected. And in that grubby uniformity lurks the genuine belief that they are on some great and important quest. In pursuing this, they block out the ugly reverberations around them, the impact that they have on life in fishing villages from Rajabag to Terekol.

This is not to say that the raggy-taggys have uniformly bad taste. For the past 40 years, they have discovered that Goa is a place where they could explore India's trove of spirituality, massage techniques and narcotics in the balmy comfort of a seaside state that enjoys a higher standard of living than most other Indian states. Of course they want to stay - wouldn't you? - and the local people have made it possible for them to.

Da Costa and D'Cruz families by the dozen saw the market opportunity that came with their permanently 1960s visitors. They started to open up bars, seafood restaurants, cheap hotels, beach huts and bakeries where the raggy-taggys could get chocolate cookies and croissants, and so achieve almost a complete escape from rice, dhal and the rawness of the subcontinent. Goa became a destination divided into extremes: the raggy-taggys and five-star resorts. Those that stayed at the resorts were protected by high walls and high prices. rarely straying beyond the big gates, except perhaps to go and look at the raggy-taggys, who themselves had become a bit of a tourist feature. One result was that people began to slay away, heading instead for next-door Kerala because it was better promoted, and had more variety for the middle income western tourist.

Then there came a sea change in Goa. It was not a sweeping thing but a small movement that created a few private hoteliers who opened stylish homes with all the grace of colonial architecture common to the grand houses of this formerly Portuguese colony, with white-pillared cool and a fusion on sunlit colour. One of these is Siolim House, a Portuguese casa de sobrado, a 300-year-old manor house that once belonged to the governor of Macau.

[ ] bought the property in a state of crumbling decay. With his drive and his French wife's good eye, they restored Siolim as a place that is part palazzo, part home; part air, part light. It exists in a bubble, removed from the rest of Goa on the edge of Siolim village, one of the rare northern coastal villages that somehow managed to escape the interest of the bhang and bhangra set.