Gauri Khan launched her coffee table book ‘My Life In Design’ at a high-profile event in a five-star hotel in Mumbai on May 15. The guests present at the launch were in for a surprise when Gauri’s husband, superstar Shah Rukh Khan, also accompanied Gauri at the book launch.
Shah Rukh Khan went down memory lane as he explained how Gauri became the designer of their iconic bungalow, Mannat, as they didn’t have money to hire a designer. Shah Rukh said, “When we got the house we live in now, it was way beyond our means. Being from Delhi, one was used to living in bungalows. One did not realize that Mumbai has its own system where apartments are even more expensive. We were not used to it, not because I was very well off but it was just that everybody in Delhi seemed to have a bungalow.”
Shah Rukh Khan continued, “We used to live in the house next to Taj (the hotel where the book launch took place). It was my director’s (Aziz Mirza) house. He lent it to us and he allowed us to stay there as long as we wanted to. We did not have a lot of money. So, as soon as we mustered up some money, we decided to buy this bungalow. It was way beyond our means. But we managed to buy it, which was one thing. We had to rebuild it because it was dilapidated and kind of broken. We didn’t have money to furnish it.”
Shah Rukh Khan revealed, “We called one designer. The lunch that he served while telling us how he would design this house was way more than the salary I used to earn in a month. We were like, ‘This guy is going to charge us a lot’. So we bought this house and what do we do with it?”
The superstar then said, “I told Gauri, ‘Listen, you have little artistic talent. Why don’t you become the designer of the house?’ So, whatever money we earned over the years, we kept on buying small things. I remember we had gone to South Africa. We had little money which we used to buy the leather for the sofa. So, it took us a while and that training ground actually made her start designing. Mannat is, if I may say, a little big and for her to start doing something at such a young age without a designer helped her also to learn.”
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