About Us

The home was originally bought by Gaurav’s great grandfather, Manmohan Pandey, who was one of the premier theater producers of his time. Manmohan Pandey bought a mansion of one hundred rooms where he and his extended family lived. In Manmohan Pandey’s time, the house was the meeting place for Bengal Renaissance figures like Raja Rammohan Roy… the home of Swami Vivekananda is a stone’s throw away, as is Jorasanko, the home of Rabindranath Tagore – both preserved as part of West Bengal’s amazing cultural heritage.

Eventually, the original mansion was divided into five parts and Bhubanbari is the portion that came to Gaurav’s father, Bhubaneswar Pandey, an Olympic swimmer, journalist, writer, and host extraordinaire. When Bhubaneswar Pandey built a new home for the family in fashionable South Kolkata, Bhubanbari was left abandoned. In reviving the home, however, Gaurav wanted to do more than simply restore, he wanted to revive in full measure the spirit of the house in his father’s time – a home full of contemporary artists and intellectuals, where people from all over the world could feel at home. To this end, we actively foster a vibrant and thoughtful community of guests, consciously different from the environment of a typical hotel or homestay.

The vision was to re-make Bhubanbari with a modern consciousness: using antiques and repurposed and upcycled materials as much as possible. Nothing from the original house has been thrown away. Iron grills that were removed from windows have been repurposed as tables and shelves. The beds on the Heritage floor are vintage, as are many of the light fixtures. The drapes in each room are vintage sarees that were crowd-sourced from friends. For Gaurab, each sourcing trip was an adventure, scanning the alleys of North Kolkata in search of authentic doors, lamps, and furniture from the early 1900s that were being thrown away or sold as scrap.

The house encourages self reliance and community living – there are many spaces for guests to mingle, kitchens and some bathrooms are shared, and there are no maids and no concept of “room service.” Cleaning staff and caretakers are valued members of the Bhubanbari hosting team.