The private plane interior that cost a million pounds - The Times
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Shalini Misra is on holiday on a large private yacht when we speak. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she says, using her phone camera to show me the shimmering Aegean waters that surround her vast shaded deck. “It belongs to one of my clients, who invited me on board. I really don’t want to leave.”
Not many interior designers have clients willing to loan them private yachts, but Misra knows these clients well. After all, she has designed their bathrooms and walk-in wardrobes, and has sometimes even chosen the contents of their kitchen cupboards. And they are, to state it mildly, loaded. One of her clients in New York, she tells me, bought the National Academy of Design next to the Guggenheim — once the home of the wealthy philanthropic Huntingdon family — and with her help returned it into a private residence with a triple-height living rooms.
Two of her most recent London renovations cost their owners over £30 million each. For that, she says, they got extras such as a swimming pool, lifts and super high-tech fittings. “So they weren’t just interiors jobs,” explains the designer, who has offices in London, New York, Dubai and Delhi. “They were huge houses and needed gutting, then reconfiguring.”
Her latest job didn’t need gutting — that had already been done for her. When she first saw the project that her client, Puneet Mahendra, wanted her to decorate, it was parked at Luton airport. It was a 15-year-old private jet — the first plane she’d ever been asked to do the interiors for — and in good condition, she says.
The problem was that Mahendra, a 54-year-old India-based thermal engineer who is also the chief strategy officer of Misra’s Curio crafts company, didn’t like the interior of the Bombardier Global Express XRS he’d bought. It was “boring”, Misra explains. So he took on the aeronautical refit company AeroVisto to remove everything that was dull and improve technical things like the air conditioning, heating and wifi. Once they’d finished, Misra was tasked with creating an interior that felt a bit more like home for someone who spent “about 300 hours” in the sky each year.
Although this was the first private jet Misra had ever done, she’d decorated a home for Mahendra before and knew his style. What he wanted, she says, was “a lot of detailing, a lot of storytelling, so that it would become a journey of discovery and curiosity… with moments of impact and would make passengers feel well and calm”. Essentially, she says, if passengers were going to be in the plane for 10 or 12 hours at a time, “he wanted it to be a bit more nurturing”.
The redecoration, costing Mahendra just shy of a million pounds, has certainly achieved that. Seating 12, the jet is an aeronautical cocoon of calming creams, with every centimetre specifically designed. On the walls are de Gournay wallpapers, hand-painted in China with Indian scenes that wrap around the corners. On the floors is a pale blue New Zealand wool and cotton carpet handwoven by Jaipur Rugs, with a soothing creamy cloud pattern flitting past the footwells. Marble accents greet guests as they step on board and line the bathroom (gold and white Calacatta Borghini — “one of my favourites,” Misra says, and cut in Germany to be 4mm thick, so as not to add too much weight).
The seats’ creamy materials came from Garrett Leather and Lance Woven Leather in London, which were then piped in blue to match the safety belts. Even the tables were specifically embellished with marquetry by Simon Orrell Designs using seven different kinds of wood — burr walnut, vavona, ash and elm, sycamore, satin walnut and maple — as well as mother of pearl from the Philippines.
The idea, Misra explains, was to try and bring as much nature into the environment, to make it feel less techy and more soothing. Which is why in the bathroom the faux-leather walls are embroidered with butterflies and blossom. This area, she admits, was one of the trickiest to create. Like the wallpaper in the main living area — which was painted to scale by de Gournay to fit the bulkheads — in the powder room each panel was designed, cut and then sewn by the English embroiderers Rosemaryrose so that no pattern was dissected. That includes each panel of fabric that lines the cupboards, she adds.
The costs were so high because they wanted every element to be handmade. The four panels of wallpaper, for instance, took painters 140 hours to paint per panel (costing a total of £28,000). The rugs took eight Indian weavers 15 weeks (and cost over £20,000). And creating the marquetry tables (costing £37,850) involved glueing hundreds of tiny bits of laser-cut timber veneer onto the tabletop and down the tables’ sides so the patterns could be viewed when the tables were folded up.
Once the passengers have enough of admiring the interiors, the seats convert into five flatbeds –– one a double bed in the master suite at the back — on which staff can place blow-up mattresses topped by fine Italian linens.
That the plane’s interiors took the designers a year, Misra says, was because every detail mattered and because everything had to be tested to be aeronautically safe. Which is why the embroidered bathroom walls are of fireproof faux leather, the marquetry is stuck with aviation-approved adhesive, and the silk de Gournay wallpaper treated with fire retardant. Each floor and wall panel also had to be installed using aircraft-certified fixings so they could be removed should engineers need to get to the plane’s wiring.
Mahendra also insisted that none of the items should be overtly branded with designer labels, which is why the blankets were sourced from Janavi in India, the crystal from Baccarat, the silverware from Christofle and the linens from Heirlooms Linens in Italy. “We do also have Dior plates,” Misra concedes, “but that’s because they so perfectly matched the wallpaper.”
And was Mahendra happy? Replying to my question via an email to Misra, he confirmed he was. “It was important that the interior felt personal rather than like a standard private jet,” he said, “and I think Shalini and the team have achieved that very well.”
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