No horn, please

Artist Anki Khurana's canvas turns into a 300-acre eco-friendly resort community she has designed.

Not another “eco-responsible” gated community, you say? We hear you on that one. Going green has been on the agenda of every other developer, but artist Anki Khurana is an unusual entry in the business. It’s not a “business” for her, she insists, for the financial worries are left to her husband Ashwini. She sticks to what she knows best - painting and landscaping — at the resort living community called Karma Lakelands that the couple is heading, in partnership with property developers Unitech. Located a short distance from Gurgaon at Manesar, 10 years ago this gated community was being pitched as a second home. But with rapid development, the city inched closer, and now buyers are looking to purchase the villas - that cost upwards of Rs 6 crore - and move in here permanently.

As the landscape artist at Karma Lakelands, Anki’s work includes landscaping and also covers designing the interiors and exteriors. “I have been saving my paintings for this project,” she says. The 6,300 square feet show villas that we see wear a white exterior finish. It’s a colour the couple would like to keep constant throughout the complex. She takes us through the work she has done in and around the house, highlighting the contemporary interiors and furnishing — high ceilings and low seating.

“I have done up the rooms brightly, especially using a lot of red. But, of course, our clients are free to choose whether they want my interior designs or not!” Each wall is generously adorned with her paintings — acrylic on canvas — in vibrant colours. Anki is adamant that the resort should look “modern” — in fact, the conventional villa structure they had opted for initially, of bungalows with red roofs, eventually gave way to the current straight-cut design without the architectural fuss of pillars and arches.

“Strategically, I wanted most of the windows and window walls to be constructed at the front and back of the house, and not on either side, to be out of sight of neighbouring homes,” Anki explains.

The USP she brings to the table — her husband Ashwini tells us — is in the kind of landscaping she has opted for, a soft, no-boundaries approach. In particular, Anki uses plantation in place of fencing or walls to demarcate areas between villas. But if you are looking for the offbeat, exotic variety, you won’t find any here. “I use indigenous plants, and avoid the exotic variety, which is obviously difficult to maintain. What’s the point of using a plant like the rhododendron, when it is not suited to the environment? It’s better to use the ashoka or silver oaks that grow fairly well here,” she says.

Anki has tread the trial-and-error path, and her instincts haven’t been greatly off the mark. “I was told that landscaping is best done during monsoons. But that’s not true! I planted through winter, and it turned out just as well,” she says.

While the artist initially worked with a landscape architect on this project, she later turned to working by herself, which she prefers. “Landscape architects prefer hard-scaping. Their interests lie in pillars and rocks and I would rather use plants and trees.” Her soft-scaping began at home, at her eight-acre place in south Delhi, and later she also designed farmhouses for a number of expats.

After more than a decade — work on Karma Lakelands began in 1998 — the artist hasn’t lost steam, enthusiastic as she is about being “eco-responsible” and pressing buyers to think green too.

If that doesn’t tempt buyers, she says, then the golf course that the villas are built around certainly will. A strict no-smoking zone, the golf course is a 70-acre manicured space around a lake. Building real estate around a golf course, the Khuranas had to take extra care. “We kept a substantial buffer area, so that an aggressive shot doesn’t travel to the villas. At the same time, a light fencing was necessary between the golf course and the houses, to prevent people sauntering onto the course,” explains Ashwini.

The sprawling golf course is certainly pleasing to the eye. The old wells on the land have been preserved and included in the rainwater-harvesting system. Manholes dotted across the course take in rain water as well, and pipes transfer the water collected to the artificial lakes. That water can then be used for irrigation.

Whether these eco-friendly strategies will sustain themselves in Karma Lakelands remains to be seen, but the Khuranas are happy to explain why their environmental concern is so strong. The couple has been involved in social planting for a good many years, including a mini forest they planted in the grounds of Tihar jail, at police stations, schools and many parks in the NCR. “The survival rate of the trees in Tihar jail is 95 per cent and 10 per cent at the police stations,” Ashwini Khurana jokes.