On the initiative of Ms. Mallika Sarabhai of Ahmedabad, Smt. Aditi Mehta, the then Director of the West Zone Cultural Center (WZCC), Udaipur, invited Abhikram to guide the renovation of the Bagore Ki Haveli in 1986. The Director had a choice of making a new building on Government land or renovate Bagore Ki Haveli, which was a difficult task as it was occupied by many tenants. On the insistence of Ms. Mallika Sarabhai and both Parul Zaveri and Nimish Patel of Abhikram, renovation of Bagore Ki Haveli was taken up to convert it into WZCC headquarters.
The conservation was carried out without us having any background in heritage restoration, in collaboration with local craftspeople, who became our teachers. It was proposed that the building layers be removed, in addition to the demolition of insensitively built walls by previous groups of tenants, to understand the layout and structure underneath. This led to the discovery of several rooms, basements and original wall layout. The conservation and adaptive reuse work is an ongoing process, by WZCC with local crafts people, as it keeps expanding.
It was the first attempt in the 1980s at the adaptive reuse of an historic building and proved to be a successful one. Seeing this, Ajay Mehta, the convener of the Udaipur Chapter of Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) initiated Abhikram, with encouraging support of Shri Martand Singh (Mapu) and Ms. Hershad Kumari Sharma of INTACH, New Delhi; in the area of conservation of historic monuments in Udaipur and to prepare the Perspective Plan for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage of Udaipur City.
