Brief & response
"Build us a forest
that has a roof."
Apr 2022
· Built handover Nov 2024
A Bengaluru couple in their late forties. Bought 42 cents of hillside in Sulthan Bathery. Single instruction: "make the home feel like the forest agreed to make space for us, not the other way around." No clearing, no boundary wall, no air conditioning.
We surveyed the plot over three days. There were 23 mature trees on the site. The slope dropped 11 metres front to back. The brief became, very quickly, an exercise in restraint. We placed the cabin on the only flat shelf the land offered, drew it in the shape of the gap between the trees, and elevated the rear half on six steel stilts so the slope continued underneath.
The result is 1,840 sqft of home — two bedrooms, an open living-kitchen, a study, a deep verandah on the monsoon side. Burmese teak shutters, terracotta tile roof, no plaster anywhere. The walls are limewashed brick. The floor is polished red oxide. In four months a moss layer has already established itself on the lower retaining wall. The forest hasn't noticed the house yet.
Ground floor plan
Drawn around
twenty-three trees.
Drawn · Hijaz Khan
· Checked · Adila Anwar
Twenty-three trees.
Zero removed.
The plan is an L-shape, wrapping around two ancient jackfruit trees that wouldn't have survived a straight rectangle. The verandah faces south-east — it catches the morning sun and shields the bedrooms from monsoon rain coming off the slope.
The kitchen and living open onto a single 14-foot-long verandah. In three of the last four months, the clients have eaten every meal there.
Image plates
Rooms that
breathe.
Photography ·
Studio archive
"It rained for five days straight last August. We sat on the verandah, watched it, and felt completely held. It is the first time in either of our lives that we have not wanted to leave a place."
