For years, Rajan Bijlani would walk past the shopfront of Fonthill Pottery in Primrose Hill admiring the tiled fireplace through the window, and wondering what the bars he saw hanging from the ceiling were. He imagined it as a kitchen where he could hang pots and pans and what it would be like to open up the huge windows to the pavement. Bijlani is a collector and dealer of furniture as well as a real estate developer, but his interest in this house was personal: “I had [worked on] three period properties in Primrose Hill already at that point,” he explains. “I always dreamt of living there.”
After noticing the property advertised by a local estate agent in 2012, he booked a viewing.
The house belonged to Emmanuel Cooper OBE, potter and activist. “At that time, it was towards the end of Emmanuel’s life. It had gotten a bit neglected, but you could just feel the history, and there was this incredible natural light on three elevations, and a wonderful terrace that overlooks the crossroads on Chalcot Road with views of Regent’s Park.” Bijlani grew up in north London and had long loved the area. “I had this feeling of warmth. It was somewhere I wanted to make home.”
Bijlani’s parents had met in India, later moving to the UK and marrying in 1975. “Home was cooking and entertaining and music. A feeling of being together,” he says.
After studying economics at university and a brief stint in the City, Bijlani switched tack and embarked upon a series of building developments in Primrose Hill, Marylebone, Notting Hill and Chelsea. More recently, he has been developing several residences on Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast, designed by Mexico-based Estudio ALA and Costa Rican studio, Entre Nos Atelier Central.
Today, after years of work, the home has a contemporary, airy feel with clean lines, pale walls and poured concrete floors contrasting with the dark wood of Bijlani’s mid-century furniture. But Bijlani was also keen that the space retained the history of the pottery. “I used Marmorino [lime] plaster on the walls and downstairs and pots for lights as an ode to Emmanuel.”
There were other significant phases to the building’s history: the bars that Bijlani had spotted were used to hang meat in the building’s first iteration as a butcher’s shop between 1871 and 1930. After that it was Bentley Acoustic Corporation, a supplier of valves, transistors and diodes, before Cooper took ownership and transformed it into Fonthill Pottery in 1976. “Emmanuel originally ran the pottery on Fonthill Road in Finsbury Park,” says Bijlani. “He saw Chalcot Road in the mid-1970s and it became his home and residence as well as workshop. In the basement, he had his wheel and kiln and on the ground floor he used to sell his pots.”
During the first viewing, he recalls the lingering presence of the butcher’s shop and how the house felt imbued with Cooper’s life. “It was a really beautiful, original, multifunctional space,” he says. “You walked into the ground floor and you had this huge, tiled fireplace and all the bars, but also this old bit of joinery where the tellers used to handle the cash for the meat. Downstairs was the kiln and the pottery wheel and upstairs the walls were adorned with books, different drawings, and bits of art that Emmanuel and his partner had collected over the years.”
The building hadn’t been touched for around 30 years. Turning the studio into a domestic space and restoring the original features across the house required meticulous research and substantial structural changes. “The ceilings were very low in the basement workshop. It was damp and there were broken tiles below the shop front that had been there from the 1870s, so I had them replicated and remade,” he says. “[The project] was complicated and challenging — to make the house both structurally viable but also retain its character and charm.”
There is always a risk that the faithful restoration of such a distinctive space can turn into a pastiche of the original, but Bijlani navigates this with clear design codes of his own. He is an avid collector of furniture from Chandigarh, the city conceived in 1947 by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Part of his collection of more than 500 pieces was recently shown at Nomad design fair in St Moritz, and is on show at Blue Mountain School in Shoreditch until October 4.
Nehru invited Modernists Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret to design the master plan and they also created furniture using teak and rosewood. Bijlani’s favourite piece, Pierre Jeanneret’s polished “Dining Table”, has what he sees as an “ethereal presence” in the ground floor dining space, surrounded by teak and cane office chairs. Other chairs and stools from his collection are dotted throughout the house. He worked closely with interior designer Rebecca Sicardi to create a style inspired in “part [by] Axel Vervoordt, part Jacques Grange”: spacious, soft and warm, combining the contemporary with the traditional.
Golconde, India’s first Modernist building, was another source of inspiration and the dark granite floor of the basement references George Nakashima’s design. An appreciation for Parisian apartments is also an influence: chevron wood block floors and white walls decorated with cornices and mouldings in the main living space and dining room. On a recent visit to designer Vincenzo De Cotiis’ refurbished palazzo in Venice, he admired the unexpected pairings of contemporary furniture with ornate historic detail: “It’s such an incredible way of exhibiting and designing”. The look of the house, he says, “continuously evolves”.
This October to coincide with Frieze London, three of the four floors of Fonthill Pottery (including bathrooms and terraces) will become a temporary gallery, playing host to Syncretic Voices, Art & Design in South Asian Diaspora, a commercial exhibition of 15 artworks, including pieces by artists Rana Begum, Vipeksha Gupta and Harminder Judge as well as 26 pieces from his collection.
Bijlani has been acquiring South Asian art and design for more than 20 years and, through the show, is looking to interrogate the diaspora’s memories and histories passed down through generations. It’s a personal reckoning. After the partition of India in 1947, Bijlani’s parents and their families, of Sindhi Hindu origin, had migrated to Mumbai, and then London. “I think there’s some part of me that saw how wonderfully colourful India was, and maybe I shied away from that as part of the process of growing up in the UK and trying to assimilate into the culture,” he says.
The exhibition is part of a broader reassessment in the UK of South Asian art and design; the Victoria and Albert Museum recently announced the refurbishment of its South Asia gallery, while October also brings the opening of The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998 at the Barbican, a group exhibition exploring India’s changing cultural-political landscape.
Michael Jefferson, an expert in 20th-century Indian art, and Truls Blaasmo, an art adviser, will act as co-curators on Bijlani’s project. “It’s an opportunity to do something in a novel way. People experiencing art and design in a domestic environment is very different to going to the gallery,” says Bijlani. “When you live with works, it changes them. When you see them in [a home] context, they become more accessible; there’s a feeling of the pieces being grounded in reality.”
There are likely to be more temporary exhibitions in the future but Bijlani is most excited about the prospect of having a family at Fonthill Pottery. “I want it to be full of life.” He says. “Not just for the public, but also for my family at some point. I think that’s probably the future.”
Charlene Prempeh is co-chair of Frieze 91. ‘Syncretic Voices’ is at Fonthill Pottery, 38 Chalcot Rd, London, October 7-November 1
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