The French Haveli in Old city Ahmedabad

Rajeev, a civil engineer who has been involved in real estate development since 1995, acquired and restored a 150 year old house that operates as a B&B in Ahmedabad old city. The French Haveli maintains it’s old design elements yet has been designed to accommodate needs of a modern day traveller. Rajeev is now adding rooms to other Havelis to form clusters in the old city. ‘Deewanji ni haveli ‘, is also under the same project , which is a restored wooden Haveli with a unique adaptive reuse plan to have sustainability of a Cultural Centre. Rajeev also co founded the City heritage Centre with a collaboration with Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to work on old city preservation as well as the THREEE Foundation (The Heritage Research for Economics Ecosystem Enterprise Foundation).

The organisation has Initiated a technical cell that builds capacity for wooden house restoration and benchmarked high quality restoration standards in the Ahmedabad walled city as well as pioneered pilot cases for Heritage TDR in partnership with Ahmedabad Municipal corporation. Some other home stay projects include Dodhia Haveli and Baghban Haveli.

The organisation is in process of establishing An IMPACT Venture, to support the World Heritage City indicators of scale up activity in restoration of private listed houses, by providing end to end solutions from documentation, reuse plans, executions and facilitation of building ecosystems for large scale work.

 The “Heritage Value chain “- Learning from Ahmedabad, presentation is about our experiences and learning form the ground that started with spontaneous acquiring of a dilapidated heritage building in walled city of Ahmedabad.  Restoration of this property forced us to look for uncanny ways of justifying investments in this heritage property meeting the inevitable question of ‘Economics of Heritage”. The ‘Heritage Value chain’ evolves in the pursuit of finding ‘return on investment ‘ of a single heritage property , but is best solved by ‘Solving the bigger problem”.  The bigger problem ‘Ahmedabad old city having thousands of heritage needs a scale implementable economic model’. Can Ahmedabad old scale up its heritage preservation drive  and also retain the tag of A World Heritage City tag?

spacesayali goyalindia