A home in Goa firmly rooted in its surroundings

Today Goa is bursting with new villas, restaurants, stores and Anjuna is at the centre of this “development”, but the Nairs got lucky and found their piece of land in this village about a decade ago. Taking a left from the most popular gelato store in Anjuna, that’s next to one of the most iconic restaurants here, as you enter their property you are transported to the Goa of 2012. Everything goes quiet and all you see is their home, coconut tree, a paddy field and the big blue sky.

Covid slowdown was the final push the Nairs needed to move here but the home was ready before that. Both Kavita and Manoj left their corporate lives in Mumbai for a shot at a more creative and harmonious one in Goa. “I think I fell in love with Goa because it is the first flight that I took when I was 23 years old. I still remember coming from the airport and thinking ‘My God, this feels like Kerala’. I felt that it was a great mix of a village life, yet people are cosmopolitan. It was something I always come back to,” says Kavita.

The Inside

The home uses the tropical Indian coastal architecture as the base and has a mix of Goa and Kerala in its design. The interiors are bright and eclectic, artifacts collected from their travels–from Italy and South Africa to Jaipur and Kerala–dot the space. Kavita loves colour, and Shonan’s team brought in 35 different kinds of patterns with just tiles into the home. Her love for ceramics is also quite evident. “It is not about what fits into the aesthetic of the home. A piece could have been bought for a specific reason–because we loved that place, or we loved that artist, or we love that person who was selling something on the street. And hence, it will always have a place in our house,” says Kavita.

There is another occupant of the home, their eight-year-old daughter Devki, who gets to grow up amongst birds, trees and flowers and learn first-hand how hard growing food can be. “She told us we cannot shoo the peacocks away from our garden because if we want food we can go to the supermarket, but the peacock has nowhere else to go. We are all learning to live with the environment around us in small and big ways,” smiles Manoj.

All images by Fabian Franco