Seats of power: the furniture that defined modern India

Photographs Jake Curtis

Now these particular pieces reside in a series of serene rooms in Primrose Hill, London, on the corner of a terrace in a house with its own cultural history. Once a butcher’s, then an electrical shop, it housed the kiln and workshop of the potter Emmanuel Cooper, who died in 2012. Now it is the home of Rajan Bijlani, a property developer who buys, renovates and sells houses, and is commissioning new ones in Costa Rica. He also owns hundreds of items of furniture from Chandigarh, a selection of which furnish his house. “I always had this love of design,” he says, as he pads about his domain in bare feet and billowing white shirt. “Growing up, I always liked to rearrange my bedroom.”

Bijlani lives here by himself, but regularly invites friends from abroad to stay for days, if not weeks, at a time. “It may seem extravagant for one guy,” he says, “but it’s a very open house. The beauty of having a space like this is to share it.”

To coincide with Frieze Masters, in nearby Regent’s Park, Bijlani is opening his home (by appointment) for just over a month. Works by Cooper, his fellow ceramicist Lucie Rie and the painter Frank Auerbach will be exhibited alongside the furniture. What all have in common is a version of modernism that embraces texture and nature, the rough as well as the smooth, rather than the polished perfection of industrial finishes. The designs of the Chandigarh furniture relish the timbre and grain of its materials.

Auerbach represented the streets of London with thick impasto; Cooper’s work, says Bijlani, was “about heat and colour”, and drew inspiration from such things as streetlights and pitted asphalt. Rie, while more refined, used “incredible volcanic glazes,” he adds.

The house has a related spirit of cherished imperfection. Bijlani bought it in 2014 from Cooper’s partner, David Horbury, who became a friend and a supporter of the developer’s changes to the house. With help from the architect Joseph Edwards and the interior designer Rebecca Sicardi, Bijlani made the old butcher’s shop into his kitchen, its big sash windows carefully upgraded, its tilework and metal bars kept, where possible. He salvaged and reused what timber he could from the rotting structure of the old house and installed floors in dark wooden reclaimed timber from Belgium. He is a hands-on homeowner – while we’re speaking, he oversees the replacement of a large glass door.

It is a house of shadows as well as light. Thanks to its position on a corner, it is illuminated from different directions while external terraces help to catch the sun. But because of the density of inner London, it also has some enclosed and buried spaces. The lower ground floor, with polished concrete and a view into a courtyard of ferns and other damp-loving plants, “embraces the darkness”. It is, says Bijlani, inspired by the Golconde dormitory for an ashram in Pondicherry, sometimes called the “first modernist building in India”, which uses black granite floors and high ceilings to create an atmosphere of shaded calm.

But it is, above all, the furniture that makes the spaces, and Bijlani likes to demonstrate its qualities by lounging in a low-slung chair or spreading his arm over a desktop to show how adapted it is to human dimensions. It was the creation of Le Corbusier’s cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, (with some input from the great man himself) and a team of largely Indian designers that included Eulie Chowdury, a young woman whose contribution was until recently under-recognised.

Some pieces, possibly those in which Le Corbusier was most involved, have a monumental quality – little buildings with pillars and cantilevers; most are lighter and easier. They were designed to be simple and hard working, using local materials and skills, for practical reasons and out of a desire to make them belong to their place.

The furniture was designed for a range of public buildings in the city – including the law courts, the secretariat, the assembly, colleges and cafeterias – offering moments of tactility and human scale in the resonating concrete spaces of Le Corbusier’s architecture. But by the end of the last century, these buildings’ managers started to throw away what seemed to them worn out and old-fashioned. Bijlani, who has family connections with Chandigarh, salvaged and collected them, starting in 2004 when he was just 20 years old.

European dealers also stepped in and made these objects, which were all designed for daily use, into highly prized collectibles that could fetch five-figure sums at auction – items cool enough for (for example) the studio of the Korean rapper RM. Bijlani has his criticisms of the “heavy” restoration of some of the dealers, but he defends the principle of removing the pieces from their place of origin. “Without the dealers going in, they wouldn’t be celebrated. They would have just been lost,” he says. “Some were being sold as firewood.”

The motivation for his own collection was “preservation and collection”, and he has started to exhibit them at a small scale, as in his current show during Frieze. He is hoping that a major institution will give them the space he believes they deserve. Meanwhile, these chairs and desks and tables, made in the service of officialdom, help make a remarkably calming environment in a private home.

Frieze London 2025 finishes today, for details go to frieze.com