Varanda

Varanda is a two-storey family house on a plot of about five cents at Edathala, near Aluva. The gate is at the back. The long side of the house turns the other way, over a grass slope towards open land that the construction drawings label simply paadam, the field. At ground level the house is wrapped in a verandah: a skirt of clay tile on slender posts that runs the whole length of that side, so the main rooms open onto shade.

Inside, most of the ground floor is one long room. Living and dining share a hall a little over ten metres long, with the kitchen at one end and the main bedroom at the other, pushing out in a bay window. Sliding doors open the hall onto the verandah and onto a concrete deck that cantilevers out over the slope. The stair rises at the back of the hall against a long strip of glazing, with a planter box outside it, and part of the hall is open to the floor above.

A skirt of clay tile runs the length of the house, and the rooms open onto its shade.

Upstairs, two bedrooms with their own bathrooms and a small multipurpose room sit behind long balconies with slim steel railings. The upper floor sits under a roof of Mangalore tile, which rises at one end to a steep gable with its rafters left open under the eaves. A projecting window with timber louvres and a screen of terracotta jaali break up the long upper wall.

The materials are plain: brick walls, rough plaster in two tones, timber windows throughout, and rubble-stone walls at either end where the ground steps. Two openings are screened with steel louvres. Their blades are tilted at 50 degrees and overlap, so rain runs off to the outside and there is no line of sight in. The house is nearly finished and built to the drawings. These images are the studio’s renders until it can be photographed.