Inside a Luxurious Bengaluru Home With Three Natural Courts (Home Tour).

Luxury to me means vastness, blurring that line between inside and outside, so you kind of are open to nature, as well as to the enclosed spaces. How do we perceive marble, not just as a material which has to be used, rather than it starts flowing with the design itself. So we really work backwards to make sure that the spaces that we design are reciprocative So House of Three Coats is what we call this project. This is in a gated community in Bangalore on Sarjapur Road. This was for a young couple who came to us way back in 2015, looking at our past work. At any point of time in the house, when you step out, open the door, you see green, and that's some essence of the house that we have kind of maintained throughout the spaces. The plot was around 80 by 75, with a corner property, with north and eastern side as roads. The north was on the main road. It had a nice tree at the junction over here. There was this corner, two trees which almost looked like one single tree. And then there was another tree somewhere here. If we have a building which actually moves more towards the western side and the southern side, and we keep the maximum green and open space on the northern as well as the eastern side. So that is where we started this whole process of almost putting a rectangular flow plate and defining the boundaries of the site. So that was one requirement in terms of the client as well, that it had to be a rectangle. Interesting aspect of the site was it was a gated community, which didn't allow compound walls to be built. There was always this question or a dilemma of how do you achieve privacy. So we decided to raise the house by about four feet, went four and a half feet down and created a basement at the lower level, which could take care of all the services, parking, and even the servants' rooms. So you're sitting at a higher level, you have a view of the road, but the person walking on the road doesn't get what happens inside. The first thought that came actually was to make a nine-grid plan, more like the Vastu Purusha. What fell in place was the Vastu requirement or the requirement of the client where he was very specific about. So the master bedroom became in the corner, the kitchen which is the southeast corner, the entry was from the northeast, and the informal living went to the northwest corner. Now because we did this nine-grid house, we could get the central open space as a courtyard. That became almost like the heart of the project around which all these rooms revolved around and even on the first floor, if you're walking up on the first floor, you kind of start making the central court as the core of the house. So we said we should add a story to it, and that's when we decided that each of the courts that start getting developed should have a specific functionality or use to it. So when you come in from the northeast, that's the foyer. The link from the foyer to the informal living is a water court. So this is on the path to the formal living. So what we really thought is people who come in to meet officially to the client, we thought that that could be their journey right from the main door. And also the experience of walking through water with the stepping stones makes it much more kind of dramatic until you enter a very formal space. So when you walk through on the left-hand side, you see the tree court, and on the right-hand side, there's just a slit which allows you to get a glimpse of what happens outside. So when you're at the foyer, you really can't see anything of the house. All you see is the water feature, and then you move into the formal living. And the central space is the land court, or the earth court, we call it. And that is the courtyard. And the back of the courtyard is actually the staircase with the services like the toilets tucked in. I mean, the best part about this court is that, you know, the plants that you see on the ground are actually chosen by the client. It's almost very personal to them. We always wanted to have the tree in the center. The idea again here was to keep it as minimal as possible, so you see a seamless marble going through, and then a little bit of wood which adds a slight warmth. Now what it also did to us is because of the eastern side being a larger setback, we could literally open the informal living as a sliding door, and the informal living with the courtyard almost became a large open space with just as the sitting almost like a pavilion in the garden. And I think the best part about the house is these trees, if you see it now, have almost covered the site, and you can really not see the building. And that's I think the beauty because it's changed over a period of time. There's a nice timelessness to the whole project. The last square which remains is a fire court where that's where the puja could go. The idea was that we don't have anything on top, so it almost becomes like a sculptural element or element within the space which becomes a backdrop to the dining and the kitchen. So the way the light moves, keeps rotating, it adds a little bit of dynamism to the space itself. The way we looked at it, it was more of a dry court. We have pebbles and marble going through. So right from the point that you are here, you can actually see a glimpse of the fire court or the puja room. But if you are sitting in the dining, then you can see the entire house with the green court and as well as the water feature which is in the formal living side. We have skylights which split the building, the terrace roof from the mass. So you have a skylight here which starts washing the light into the courtyards and along the staircase. And plus we have a cutout exactly above the tree which allows light to come onto the court. So the ground floor master bedroom was in the southwest corner while on top, the southeast, northwest and the southwest again became bedrooms, three bedrooms. So that totally makes it four bedrooms. In the double height informal living on the top floor, we had a small kind of overlooking balcony like an inside balcony which looks down into the living. So it's almost like a connection between the first floor and the second floor. So if somebody comes out from the bedroom, you can actually start interacting with the person downstairs. So it's not like confined. We've used wood, acrylic surfaces, metals in terms of furniture somewhere. Granite has also been used as a contrast to the polish of marble. So even when we were planning the larger bedroom, their requirement was that it should be just enough so that you have a bed and the TV unit and the other space should not be cluttered and that's how it is planned. So you have the bed and maybe just one seating arrangement with a small study table. So this was designed as one of the kids' bedroom. We kind of looked at a room which still has a bit playful and colourful, but at it can tomorrow when they grow up, it suits their teenage and eventually when they become adults, the materials going through like the wood as a wooden study table or even the headboard as a fabric headboard. We're all looking at it in terms of maybe five, six years down the line when the kids grow up. All the bathrooms were kind of designed with a natural light penetrating, so we have skylights in that. Each bathroom had a theme in terms of the design. So while the master bedroom was with a combination of Karara white sattuarium marble and we have the granite pieces which were made to look more like square pattern onto the master bedroom with plants in it. One of the kids' bedroom, we kind of used these Moroccan tiles and that same concept went into the bedrooms and as handles of the headboard. The northeast corner was given for the home theatre, which is more like a private lounge space, which almost becomes like an extension to the living. When the client came to me in the first place, he asked me what's USP, I said, you will not have to switch on the lights from eight o'clock in the morning to six p.m. in the evening. And I think that's something which we have achieved. There's sometimes more light than we would have expected. In terms of luxury, I think people are going to be bolder in terms of using the choice of materials. When I say bolder, I don't mean they are going to go overboard, but I think they will come to a sense where they know the right use of what is the best material suited to them. The first criteria for the client was to use marble, which is seamless, which is going through the entire rooms. It's been a part of the project right from day one or any material for that matter, even wood or black granite, they were materials which were thought of at the start of the design itself, and they were there because they had to be there. It depends on a person what luxury coefficient is about. The clarity of thought for a person of what his luxury is, is slowly going to be the trend for the future. That clarity of thought is something which has translated into the way the house is being and the way it has been even nurtured even now. Something which we really strive to do, allow the building to be timeless, and I think this building has stood the testimony of time itself.