3,300 sq. ft. | Courtyard House inspired by Chettinad Architecture in Hyderabad | Urban Narratives

It all started as a process of keeping the user in mind, keeping the block in mind, keeping context in mind, where it's for a young couple that wanted a lot of interaction with the friends and the family. The Courtyard House is a house for a very young couple and their toddler and their parents. So the brief from the clients was to have a lot of interaction spaces. The site is located in a very beautiful urban context with a residential area around but is also very densely packed. The plot is 375 square yards with a road on the east. So basically we have done a program analysis and we have the basic layout in hand. We wanted the living as soon as you enter, then you have the kitchen. We wanted to have the dining area and the guest room and this entire zone we wanted to make it an interaction zone. Since we didn't want to lift the house, what we've done is we've pushed the volume back and we thought we'll have the parking in the ground floor itself. And the first floor we thought we'll have basically a private resting zone where you have the master, you have the kid's bedroom, you have the client's room and we have a common multi-purpose room. The design process started by saying that there's no point of interest from the context. We had to create a point of interest. That's the birth of a Courtyard House. We had chopped off the front side. So now we've taken advantage of the setbacks and we've taken advantage of the dead end and we're left with this. We've removed the front part in the east so that the east light comes in. We have removed another mass and that's the pooja that floats in the water. That's how the design was organically derived. We had to add another mass there which becomes the balcony for one of the rooms. You have the entrance and you have the vehicular entrance. The two gates slide on either side so you have four car parks. So you come here, you walk straight and you have a very nice welcoming space into the courtyard. So from here I go, I have glazing here where the rooms don't look narrow. They look wide and open so I have visual access to the garden and here I have the kitchen. We never wanted to have a closed kitchen so the kitchen opens to the dining and I have a visual access through the dining. If there's a wet activity then we have another linear supporting kitchen in the back. This multi-purpose room has become a theatre with an attached bar which has a sliding shuttering door which moves to the corner and now this becomes a hosting zone. The light and the landscape is something that will keep you calm and we always wanted to have that connection to it throughout the house. So we were imagining a situation where we have this L chajja where we have creepers falling down and you have landscape on the top, you have the landscape on the bottom and the thing is all about how we visually connect and emphasize the experience. The first floor predominantly is the resting zone where this becomes a private living which is again connected visually to the courtyard. This is the kid's bedroom which has a pop-out window where if you sit here you see the road. So obviously first floor you wanted the house to be connected so that gave birth to a double height cutout where the kid gets up, he walks, he stands near this window and sees what his parents are doing. If he gets a visual access he'll be like hi and if he doesn't then he goes further ahead and stands near the double height and calls his mother in the kitchen. One of the most exciting things we have in the house is the client's bedroom which is visually connected to the balcony. They wake up, have their coffee there, you know have their conversations there and it's connected to another landscape pocket. So in terms of materials we wanted to keep it very simple and very grounded and rooted. We've used different kinds of flooring to the house. On the outside it's mostly black kadapa in a rough finish so it's easy to maintain. It's also a very beautiful black color. The flooring for the majority of the house, the indoor spaces is a kota in a diamond polish. So the kota kind of balances the light in the space and it's also a very cool gray so it kind of brings down or grounds the entire house. The staircase was intentionally made white to kind of cut down the visual weight that the gray would probably give it. In some of the spaces the gray is broken out by some handmade cement tiles in a bright yellow color and multicolored atoms. So the whole thing is not too monotonous and there's a bit of a surprise element. So another important material that you see throughout the house is the solid teak wood. Now we've sourced the teak wood from an old house and the wood was originally structural members of this house. So over the years it's gone through all the wear and tear that it could go to and it warped itself. So now when you use it it's a very strong material as compared to new teak. So we've used this teak to make all the doors and windows of the house and also other carpentry elements. So that's something that excited us to work with our carpenters and explore different types of handles and different types of joinery details. The railings we really wanted to keep them very simple but security also plays a major role. So we did a teak wood handle which is very sleek and added glass for security. Coming to the dining table in the house one thing we were clear is that we wanted to make it a statement because it's kind of a central element in the whole house and it acts as an art piece in itself. So we collaborated with an architect friend of ours Nasar who built this table with different pieces of marble and put it together in this beautiful collage that kind of now becomes the center of attention in the ground floor. So the color and the character of the house actually comes from the artwork, the plants that they bring in, the cushions, the carpets and it can gradually evolve and grow with time. We wanted to bring in a little bit of gloss and texture in the space and that we did by adding a lot of elements in brass. So all the accent pieces which are the lighting, fixtures, some artwork and also some handles and latches are in brushed brass which brings in a lot of character to the space. There was a day when my client arranged to us saying all the generations in the house use this space especially the courtyard. She goes like her in-law comes there for a coffee then the kid joins him in the courtyard and he plays around then the client comes back from the gym and he joins them with the newspaper in hand and it all comes together you know and that's what is fun.