With stories, memories and photographs, we toast the interior designer and art connoisseur who passed away two weeks ago, leaving behind a legacy that spans the Taj properties
Everyone has a story (or 50) about Elisabetha Kerkar, the interior designer who gave Taj Hotels its distinct design identity in the latter decades of the 20th century. For Naomi Menezes, a close friend, it is about a small, weather-beaten, 300-year-old Portuguese map of Goa that Elisabetha had restored, mounted and framed. “She asked me if she could use it in some way. The next thing I knew, it was blown up into an 18 ft x 6 ft print and mounted at the back of Fort Aguada’s Anchor bar,” says the wife of Lenny Menezes, director of Goa’s first five-star beach resort, underlining how Elisabetha had an eye for the unusual.
For Saraswathi Mahadevan, former executive housekeeper at Taj Lake Palace,…