Chettinad is the native land of the Chettiars, a thriving business community who were in to trade, mostly overseas trade. They made enormous wealth and all of this was invested into building huge mansions to accommodate their joint families. Today you go to Chettinad, this community has almost left their villages and have settled in different parts of the world. Overtime they invested in themselves with education and is working and have settled in far off lands, which has left these mansions locked with no occupants.
These mansions are marvellous, they have Burmese teak wood, unique architecture that suits their joint family concept - generally a mansion can occupy hundreds of people. Almost all mansions will have a central courtyard and and entrance from the kitchen as well. Among all of the materials used to build the house, the flooring tiles was indigenously made in a Chettinad village named Athangudi.
They used to make hand made tiles with beautiful designs with an arrangement of different colours. The below video was shot during one of our tours, It is something not to miss while traveling through Tamil Nadu and we at Green Earth Trails make it a point to have a stop here.
Today, they are not natural dyes and colours any more. The colour is mixed with white cement and is made into a liquid. They pour the liquid on top of a glass frame, a prefied frame is fixed on top of the glass and the colours and poured in. A mixture of sand is sieved over the colour, and is finally sealed with cement. The Tiles are dipped in water for seven days to two weeks and finally taken out. The glass is removed and reused for the next batch of tiles. The tile designs are always customized as per the requirement of the customer. Which means that the customer has a lot of flexibility in deciding the colour and the design. Is'nt it interesting!
Our teams travel with our guests starting from small groups, this enables us to give you the best of the Kerala and South India tours. Just like athangudi tiles, we design the tours based on your interest for activities, places interest and accommodation.