By Indi Khanna
A couple of days ago the Tea Studio had a visitor who said to me "I've never seen a tea factory having a colour such as this." A simple observation and a perfectly innocuous remark. But then, there is a story behind it.
This goes back to 2014 when the Tea Studio was in the planning stages. Having purchased the land on which the Studio was to come up, Aditya Menon, the young straight out of architectural school architect, and I were standing on the hill overlooking the site discussing the one line brief we had given him for the design of the Studio to "think out of the box." I remember asking Aditya whether he had any ideas about what should be the colour of the building, bearing in mind that we would want the building to stand out and be as unique as the teas we planned to produce within.
We just happened to be standing under a Viki Maram, a tree which is indigenous to the Western Ghats which has a fruit akin to a wild olive, tossing ideas around when young Aditya looking skyward, probably seeking divine inspiration, points upward into the canopy of the tree and comes up with "how about that colour?" "THAT" colour which he was pointing towards was a mature leaf on the tree. As it matures, the leaf of the Viki Maram changes colour from a very light green to a rather unique bright shade of reddish-scarlet.
"Eureka!"
And the rest, as they say, is history!