30-07-2025
- General
- New Indian Express
165-yr-old 'mansion' gets a makeover
When you go looking for the postmaster general's office on Palace Road, what greets you is a typical whitewashed government office, but a few steps further reveals a roughly 175-year-old mansion that seems to have slipped through a stitch in time, with the Mangalore tile roofs and beautiful bay windows to prove it.
Beaulieu (French word for 'beautiful place'), once the abode of a British civil servant, a princess, and a former Dewan of Mysore, is currently undergoing restoration.
Built around 1860 by British civil servant Lancelot Ricketts, who served as the first editor of the Mysore Gazette and as the director of Lal Bagh, Beaulieu was part of grounds spanning 24 acres where the horticulture enthusiast experimented with farming, had wells, stables, a pond, and outhouses. 'It was a whole lot bigger and stretched very close to Cubbon Park. Since then, it's been sold off in 10 pieces. The old compound is gone, and there are no sheep in the gardens, no potatoes growing there anymore – it's difficult to imagine all that,' comments historian Meera Iyer, who is also the director of the Bengaluru chapter of INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage), which is restoring the building.
A few decades in, Ricketts, for reasons unknown, sold the building to Princess Jayalakshmammanni (also the owner of Jayalakshmi Vilas Palace in Mysuru), the eldest daughter of Chamarajendra Wadiyar X, in 1900. It was her and her husband, the former Dewan of Mysore M Kantharaj Urs' Bengaluru abode for decades until their daughter Leelavathi inherited it. 'A lot of houses on and around Palace Road were owned by the royal family. Princesses had their own mansion in Bengaluru and a palace in Mysuru,' explains Iyer. During World War II, the estate was briefly occupied by the army, as Leelavathi allowed them to use it rent-free for the war effort.
