2,600 sq. ft. - Eco-Friendly Farmhouse in Aroor, Telangana - Studio Inscape (Home Tour)

We firmly believe that if architecture respects nature, only then will we be able to merge with the surroundings. The project that we want to talk about today is a weekend home for a doctor couple. So it's located at Arur, Telangana, which is about 100 kilometers away from the city of Hyderabad. So the site is a 19 acre organic farmland. We chose an age old neem tree and, you know, took that as a reference and we started weaving the whole house around it. The lady of the house basically wanted a nice courtyard home, a cozy courtyard home. But the husband actually wanted a linear and a functional house. He wanted this because he wanted a lot of interaction to happen with the farm workers over the weekends whenever he's at the farm. The orientation of north-south basically lets in a lot of lighting. At the same time, it restricts heating of the building. The main entry was oriented towards the east of the building. So all the morning activities like interacting with the farm workers and all was done in this veranda space itself. Also we had opened up our kitchen towards this east so that we let in the maximum morning sunlight. So our living room was located in the northeast direction and we opened up our windows. So we had a fixed bench. We wanted the space to double up as another bedroom when necessary. Since we only had loose furniture around the bench, we could actually remove the entire furniture and use this whole space as a sleeping area. And we also had an old swing that was collected by the client. We tried to scale down the entry at the main door so that when it opens up into the house, you have the element of surprise which is basically the courtyard. This courtyard had a brick jolly wall which basically let in all the light that was necessary. But at the same time, it would not let the heat enter into this courtyard. So as we walk through this linear corridor, we come up to the dining space which is basically again open onto both sides of the house. So we also tried to inculcate these old columns that were procured from the dismantled houses of Tamil Nadu. And we scaled this whole corridor space down so that it becomes more relatable when you walk through the corridor. The bedrooms are located in the northwest and southwest directions of the house. And there is a rear entry as well which is located onto the west side. So as the day passes, basically all the activities from the east shift towards the west end of the site. Also there is a staircase that leads to the terrace area of the house. This staircase has been treated more of an interactive space. To the master bedroom, we have a semi-open toilet which is more of an experiential space. Since the design ideology was to have this house as a very subtle foreground with nature as its backdrop, hence we chose materials that were available around 15 to 20 kilometers away from the site only. We had used CSEB earth blocks for this entire skin of the structure and the courtyard flooring and the brick jolly wall in the courtyard as well. CSEB is nothing but compressed stabilized blocks. So we had used the excavated soil from the site itself to make these bricks. Also CRS masonry was something that we used as the base for the entire house. So all the rubble and the stone that was acquired was also excavated from the site itself. Then for the flooring, we had gone with tandoor, yellow leather finish tandoor along with cement oxide as the skirting. So all the private areas of the house like the bedrooms especially, we lime washed the walls whereas the entire house was left exposed brick. We did this intentionally because we wanted the bedrooms to be slightly cozier when you compare to the other common spaces. Also toggle switches which we actually found from the old houses were reused here. Black exposed conduiting was used to complement the toggle switches. For all the doors, windows, fixed and loose furniture, we had gone with reclaimed and salvaged wood because we wanted to make this building more sustainable. And at the same time, we went with colored cement oxides like bright yellow and blue in the washrooms. The dining and all the bedroom portions basically had a sloped terracotta roof. So the base for this terracotta tiles are palmwood rafters and purlins. The terracotta tiles were from a dismantled house. The dining and the bedroom areas had a larger scale where they could experience the space from inside whereas when we had come to the veranda or the corridor area, we wanted to scale down the roof so that the view to the courtyard opens up whenever we step down and come into this space to actually experience it. So even though the site was a 19 acre farm area, the client was very conscious of having a smaller footprint of the house. So the entire built up area of the house was only about 2400 square foot. The CSEB bricks and all the manpower that was used to make this bricks and the house as well belong to these towns and villages around the site. So this actually made the house more economical and affordable when you compare it to any other conventional way of construction. So we just don't want to be true to the material that we are using but we also want to be true to the form of the whole building. So this makes our design practice not only sustainable but experiential as well.