Dutch fashion designer Marie-Anne Oudejans never intended to live in India, or to become a decorator. But “sometimes,” she says, “you need an adventure.” So for the past six years, Oudejans has resided in Jaipur, in a one-bedroom flat in the romantic Hotel Narain Niwas Palace. She decorated her own rooms, as well as the apartment of her longtime friend French jewelry designer Marie-Hélène de Taillac, the hotel’s quirky Bar Palladio Jaipur, and the Mumbai outpost of the Gem Palace, Jaipur’s epicenter for colorful jewels.
Serendipity played a central role in Oudejans’s life change. Seven years ago, on a flight from Tokyo to Madrid, where she then lived, a fellow passenger asked, “Why don’t you go to India?” She thought, Why not? Within months she and her border collie, Aedo, had moved to Delhi. It was a bad fit: “Too large and too loud.” So Oudejans gave provincial Jaipur a try. Known as the Pink City—it was painted a soft salmon hue for the visit of the Prince of Wales in 1876—Jaipur is the country’s capital for artisanal craftsmanship, block-printed textiles, and the gem trade.
Oudejans, the genius behind the award-winning mid-1990s fashion line Tocca, which featured dresses made of sari cloth, felt right at home. She moved into Narain Niwas, a former country villa built in 1928 for the Thakur of Kanota, a local nobleman, and settled into a ground-floor apartment that opens onto the pool and a lush tropical garden populated by peacocks, parrots, and monkeys. “It’s a magical place,” she says. “It’s as you imagine India would be.”
One day, Taillac—who splits her time between Jaipur and an apartment in Paris—was driving by Narain Niwas when she spied a chic woman “wearing a pencil skirt and a little fur jacket. She looked amazing,” she recalls. “Then I realized it was Marie-Anne.” Old pals who had worked for the fashion designer Kenzo in the ’80s, the women hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade. “We had re-found each other,” Taillac says. “Here, in Jaipur!”
A few years ago, another European transplant, hotelier Barbara Miolini, asked Oudejans to design Bar Palladio, Narain Niwas’s Italian-cuisine restaurant and bar. Inspired by the opulent lifestyles of the maharajas of the early 20th century, Oudejans came up with a colorful fantasia of mirrored salons framed by murals of exotic fowl and crowned by tented ceilings. Soon she was creating chaise longues for the pool area and installing wrought-iron daybeds there, too, tented for respite from the sun. “I hadn’t thought about doing interiors, but Barbara gave me this opportunity,” Oudejans says. “And it was so much fun. I wanted to keep doing it.”
Then Oudejans learned that hotel management wanted to repaint her suite. “I thought, Let’s change the colors and make it look more like me,” she says. She called on artisans who had worked on Bar Palladio to build a clutch of consoles throughout the flat, had painters create Moghul-style flower murals, and added a few gold mirrors and block-printed linens, which she had made locally. As she did for Bar Palladio, she had the apartment’s ceilings painted to look like tents and topped her beds with canopies. “My grandmother had tents in her garden in the Netherlands,” Oudejans explains. “She had them made for all her grandchildren, and we played in them.” Because of that, she says, “everything I do has tents.”
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