The restoration of Copper House

I don't really think about the fact that it's celebrated or talked about or written about. For me, it's home. It's where we come as a family to get away from the hustle of Bombay, which was the original idea to build a home in Alibaug. I said I'm not going to wait till I'm 80 to experience the shade of trees. Part of the reason why I chose this piece of land over anything else we saw is that it had mature trees. Because there's a lot of water scarcity in this area, so I was looking for land that had a natural water resource. So it's by the Chondi River and it was just perfect. When I gave the brief to Studio Mumbai, I was very keen to have a courtyard, which is traditionally the central point of gathering for a family. My mother called and said, Kuki, would you like this boulder? It was part of her garden. It was very sentimental to her. In Coonoor, in her house there, there was a landslide. This boulder actually came down the mountain and stopped at her front door. Nothing was destroyed. Her house was not destroyed despite the landslide. Bijoy overheard me say this. I said, this is a huge boulder. He said, yes, yes, we want it. It came on a truck from Chennai. They had to get a crane, had to remove the entire front door, placed where he wanted it, and then they reconstructed the main door back, just to incorporate this boulder. It was quite, and still is, a forest outside of the house. And so the idea was to colonize, as Bijoy would say, your space within the forest. The original idea that Bijoy had was actually to put a copper roof. The idea was that it would turn green and would sort of integrate and not be visible in the forest. But in this weather, it gets darker, so it gets a darker brown. Copper has its own plans. Once you start living in the space, you realize, okay, I need to do this, or I need to change that. Over the years, the house had taken like an onslaught of weather conditions. The longevity of it was being compromised with the leakage. And we weren't quite sure how to address it because it's a very unusually constructed roof. There's a copper kind of cladding, which then integrates into the ground floor and becomes wood and concrete at the bottom and required pretty major renovations and changes in order to give it a new life. I started chatting with Jeeva Ram, who used to work with Studio Mumbai and Bijoy earlier on when the house was built. He said, look, why don't you meet with Pooja? She has a great understanding of the aesthetic as well as the materials, and I'm sure she'd be able to figure this out. And so that's how we started. The master bedroom was divided into two spaces. One was our space for sleeping, which was on one end, a passage, and there was a bathroom. And at the end of the passage was a little room that we had created. When we moved in, we realized that, I mean, why would anyone want to sit in a little room when you have this glorious place to be in? And so Pooja came up with some interesting ideas on how we could make the space more functional. And so we have this wonderful new, big, huge bathroom instead of the long, narrow bathroom, and it looks seamless with the aesthetic of the house. It has now become a space that is not only just a beautiful house, which it always was, but is now so functional, so practical, can withstand the elements. It's come together so well for us as a family, and the spaces are just so much more comfortable and thought about. It's a pleasure.