Ambassador Corrêa do Lago, a passionate architecture enthusiast who serves on the current Pritzker Prize jury, which selected BV Doshi for the prestigious award in 2018, confesses to having eyed the New Delhi post for years. As a specialist in multilateral diplomacy and climate change, he visited India frequently, fascinated by its growing clout as cultural superpower and economic powerhouse. So when the job finally fell in his lap, the well-proportioned beauty of the colonial residence was the icing on the cake.

A devotion to modernist design is but one of the many strands of taste that unites the couple. He and his wife, Beatrice both come from cosmopolitan families of inveterate collectors, one reason why room after room of their home yields distinctive troves of treasure. The ambassador's grandfather, Osvaldo Aranha, was a distinguished Brazilian statesman and foreign minister; his father, like himself, a diplomat, while his brother Pedro is an obsessive collector of literary manuscripts and letters. 

His wife, Paris-born Beatrice, is of mixed French, Italian, Spanish and Greek ancestries. Her grandfather was Paul-Louis Weiller, the famous French aviation hero of World War I and later, a wealthy financier and philanthropist. 

A wall of the small sitting room is hung with Weiller's portraits by Marie Laurencin and Jean Cocteau; nearby are magazine pin-ups of her Greek grandmother, a celebrated Miss Europe of 1930. Enthusiastic collectors, bibliophiles and aesthetes, not everything in the Corrêa do Lagos' globetrotting caravan came to them through acquisition or inheritance. Some of it is from the serendipity of the lands through which they've passed.