Mukesh Ambani’s dream house is not yet his home

Source :The Week :Vikas Banaj :Saturday, November 26, 2011 16:55 hrs IST 




When the richest man in India completed his extravagant 27-storey house in Mumbai last year, it incited a public debate along the lines of‚ “What is he trying to prove?” Now, the chatter involves a different question: Why hasn't he moved in?

Mukesh Ambani and his spokesman have declined to discuss the matter, leaving plenty of room for theories. One popular explanation is that, despite the time and money lavished upon it, the building does not conform to vastu shastra. Certainly the home—named Antilia, which has three helipads, six floors of parking and a series of floating gardens—looks lived in.
 At night, the cantilevered tower is lit up top to bottom, inside and out. Members of the city's moneyed class report having attended movie screenings in its theatre and eaten dinners in the grand ballroom, served by staff trained by the luxury Oberoi hotel chain.





Yet, friends of the family say that after the last canapés have been served and the guests have bidden goodbye, the Ambanis often decamp to Sea Wind. 

That is the more modest, 14-storey apartment tower at the south end of the city that Ambani, wife, Nita, and three children share—on different floors—with his mother and his estranged younger brother, Anil, and Anil's family.





When does Mukesh Ambani plan to move into Antilia? “I have asked him the question twice,” said a friend who has attended several parties there. He asked not to be identified for fear of ruining his relationship with Ambani, whose net worth Forbes has estimated at $27 billion. “He said, ‘Yes, we'll go next month. Let it be done.' They don't talk about it.”


 Another close family friend confirmed that the Ambani family did not live at Antilia but said members did sleep there “sometimes”. This friend, who also asked not to be identified to avoid offending Ambani, had no explanation.

Ganesh idles for the house

Tushar Pania, a spokesman for Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd dismissed questions about whether the family was living at Antilia as idle gossip. “It's a private home. There is no reason to discuss it in public,” he said. He said they had moved in, but when asked whether the family still lived at Sea Wind, he revised: “They live in both places.”

But why would someone build what is widely considered the world's most expensive private residence and then use it as a pied-à-terre? Some friends, business associates and Ambani watchers offer the vastu shastra explanation, which gained wider currency earlier this year when a newspaper in Mumbai published an article about it citing “sources in the know”.

Basannt R. Rasiwasia, a vastu expert whose clients include prominent businessmen and their families, although not Ambani, said Antilia appeared to run afoul of one of the key principles of vastu: the building's eastern side does not have enough windows or other openings to let residents receive ample morning light.




“From the outside, what I see is that the eastern side is blocked, while the western side is more open,” he said. “This always leads to misunderstanding between team members. This also indicates more hard work to achieve moderate success. There is more negative energy coming from the western side.”

Rasiwasia cautioned that he could not provide a full analysis, as he had not been inside the building, which was designed by the architectural firm Perkins & Will and the interior design firm Hirsch Bedner Associates, both American. Officials from the firms declined to comment, citing confidentiality agreements.

Even before it was built, Antilia was clouded by controversy. Ambani acquired the plot where the tower sits, on Altamount Road, in 2002. He bought it for 021.5 crore, from a Muslim charitable trust. Muslim political leaders and other critics said that the land was sold for only a small fraction of its market value. Ambani acquired the property in an auction, and his spokesman has denied allegations that he paid less than the land's market value.





Last year, as Antilia was nearing completion, many Mumbai residents criticised the building as an ostentatious display of wealth in a city where more than half the population lives in slums. Gyan Prakash, a history professor at Princeton University in New Jersey who wrote the book Mumbai Fables, said the criticism could have influenced the family's decision not to make Antilia its full-time residence.


 “It is one thing to brashly announce your arrival in the billionaire's club by looking down on the rest of the city from your gated community in the sky,” he said via email, “but then you may realise that it is lonely at the top!”

But even if the Ambanis now have reservations about Antilia, the building appears to have some admirers. Eight hundred metres away, in the waterfront Breach Candy neighbourhood, another rich Mumbai business clan, the Singhania family, is building a tower with cantilevered floors.


 Many say it resembles Antilia.

The move-in date? Don't ask.