Topsy-turvy villas and cottages

A resort without a masterplan - that’s what you should expect at the maverick Dune, in Puducherry, writes Kishore Singh

It is in the fitness of things that maverick fashion designer Manish Arora should design a villa at the equally maverick Dune Eco Village on the fringes of Puducherry. “We’re currently working on it,” confirms Dimitri Klein, the Frenchman who upped and sold his advertising agency in France to go around the world to see in which exotic part of the world he should next make his home. When his wife became pregnant in India, he took that as an omen, and the couple moved to Auroville for four years.

That was in 1998. In 2002, he did a hospitality project — the restoration of the Duplex in Puducherry as a heritage hotel for Dilip Kapur of Hi-Design — and loved it so much, he decided to launch his own initiative.

Spread over 35 acres of re-greened land on the Coromandel coast, 15 km from Puducherry, the Dune is likely the maddest place you’ll find in India. For starters, it’s ecologically and environmentally friendly. From solar hot water systems to a waste water treatment plant for all the water used at the resort to 90 per cent organic food in its restaurants to organic curtains, shampoos, soaps, housekeeping products… you get the drift. Only half the 50-odd rooms have air-conditioning, the sea breeze providing the rest with enough cooling to eliminate the need for artificial cooling. No traffic is allowed inside the property. “Our carbon footprint,” says Klein, “is 70 per cent less than the rest of the hotel industry.”

But it’s the design and architecture that is so mad, it’s brilliant. “Hotel rooms around the world are the same,” says Klein, “the Dune had to be unique.” Unique is perhaps an understatement. In keeping with its environment consciousness, Klein and his team have used recycled properties to build the property. As a result, it hasn’t adhered to any architectural masterplan. Klein collected used wood and bricks and doors and windows and furniture, and it was from these pieces of “junk, or antiques” that the rooms and villas and suites took shape. Each room is different because it would be difficult to replicate, the inspiration coming from French Pondicherry, traditional Kerala, medieval Chola, kitschy India, even edgy Auroville. “We just used things in the most creative way possible,” laughs Klein.

An architect friend, a German based in Chennai, helped in the process, but at least half the rooms have been finished in collaboration with artists of different sensibilities — painters, photographers, designers, architects. “There was no way they couldn’t be interesting,” says Klein.

Though a 35-acre site should support, in hospitality parlance, 200 rooms, the Dune currently has 50 operational rooms, while another 10 are works in progress. “When we have the right ideas and the right people, we’ll complete the rest,” he says. There are the usual mod-cons you’d expect: fine dining, a spa and so on, but it is the joyfulness of the architecture and design that turns the Dune Eco Village into a unique experience: no wonder its on Geo France’s top five eco-tourism destinations of the world.