150-YEAR-OLD Kerala Home In Thrissur Gets a Traditional Makeover (House Tour)

Manakat House is a renovation project. This house was more than 150 years old. So we can say this is a project which evolves, which goes through the past and the present. Manakat is actually the family name of the clients. Hi, I'm architect Mahesh from Viewpoint Design, Thrissur. Join me for an exclusive home tour of Manakat House, which is situated in Guruvayur, Thrissur. To watch premium videos and access PDF e-books with house plans, please log on to buildofi.com. The link is given in the description below. This is a normal village area, we can say. The plot is like almost three acres of land, filled with greenery, lush vegetation. When I visited the site, some of the wooden structures were very old, which has to be removed. Considering this generation, the height of the building was too low. The rooms were very small. So I wanted to give them as much space as possible. Speaking of the clients, it is an unusual client bio, because four generations of family living under the same roof. I created an approach from the southwest corner, which leads to the house. This is the sit-out of the house. Previously, there was no sit-out. It was only the extension of the verandahs, converted an existing room, which was a small room, and the existing verandahs, and I transformed it into a grand sit-out. As I told, this is an ancestral home, so a lot of guests or a lot of relatives are going to visit them. So I kind of created a gazebo, you know, a sitting space, that resembles like a poo-mugam, that is a sit-out in old traditional houses. We had two sides of verandah, which I kept intact. So we entered from that sit-out to a living space. So this was the existing structure, and I had removed this wall to attain a very grand living room. Considering this generation, the height of the building was too low. It was about eight feet underneath the wooden ceiling. That was the first thing that came into my mind, because I need to change the volume of the spaces. There were no lintels provided. So we had to remove whatever was present above the lintel, and create a lintel initially. And from there, we started building up. Nalukattu is a Malayalam word used for traditional courtyard houses. This nalukattu means there are four blocks surrounding each other, and there will be a central open space. That is called the central courtyard. That is the main theme, which has been followed from generations in Kerala architecture. So the main process is letting the wind from every direction, and suck out the hot air through the central open courtyard. That is the basic theme of nalukattu houses. Then next to that living space, we entered the sides of the courtyard, and through the sides, we entered the bedrooms. We have gone for the normal traditional theme only. These windows, as I mentioned, we have reused the woods we have recovered from the existing structure. You know, constructing a new house, we don't have any kind of limitations. Where in renovation, we had to deal with vastu. We were not allowed to extend beyond the existing lint area. The client has to be sure that the project is worthy of renovation, or they need to build a new house. Renovation is not starting something new. It is a continuity of what has been there. It is a continuity of their lifestyle. It is nothing fresh or new. Those houses were built with mud blocks. So at that time, there were no cement mortar and all. They used calcium oxide and all. So the walls had to be a minimum of 45 centimeters or 50 centimeters thick. So when we were renovating this, we decided to keep the walls as much as possible. But we had to remove all the exterior calcium plastering, and we had to do the cement plastering because the strength was an issue with this project. Nowadays in Kerala, it's kind of extreme climate. You know, when it is raining, it rains heavily. I think the roofing design evolved from those things. They had to, you know, drain out every bit of water from the roof and all. So the sloping roofs came into existence, maybe because of the climatic features of Kerala. When I was having conversations with the clients, especially the grandmother, she's like 90, 85, 90 years old. She has been familiar with these elements from the day she was born. But when she came and entered the space, she was like, you know, I can see in her eyes that old memories, that old nostalgic memories were running through her eyes. So when I saw her eyes, that was much more satisfying for me than anything.