BETWEEN GARDENS I Tropical home at Calicut I De earth Architects
Between Gardens emerged from what was initially envisioned as a modest renovation of an existing home on a long, narrow 26 cent site in Nadakkav, Kozhikode. The project began with a deeply personal urgency: a son’s wish to create a new home for his mother at the earliest. While the intention was initially to preserve and adapt the existing structure, the process gradually revealed structural
inconsistencies, level differences, spatial limitations, and regulatory challenges that made retention increasingly difficult. Over time, the intervention evolved into a complete re-making. The house that stands today is entirely new, yet deeply shaped by the discipline of working within inherited memories, boundaries, and constraints.
Surrounded by closely built residences and a four storey apartment block, the site offered little inherent privacy. Rather than resisting this condition, the design turns inward, creating a layered internal world shaped by gardens, courtyards, water, filtered light, and shadow. The clients envisioned a home that felt warm, rooted, and deeply lived in rather than overly formal or curated; a house capable of holding both
the quiet rhythms of everyday life and moments of gathering, celebration, work, reflection, and retreat. Equally important was the desire to carry fragments of their previous life into the new home through furniture, artefacts, artworks, and objects layered with memory.
The architecture unfolds as a sequence of thresholds rather than a singular gesture. Movement through the house bends, pauses, reveals, and conceals, dissolving the site’s linearity through moments of compression and release. From the entrance courtyard to semi open living spaces and interconnected courts, the experience is discovered gradually through fragments of landscape, water, sky, and built form.
Each courtyard carries its own atmosphere while remaining part of a continuous spatial narrative: a handcrafted brass lamp anchors the arrival court, a koi pond introduces stillness, pergola shaded verandas filter neighbouring views, while deeper within, a long linear pool extends calmness and privacy into the family living spaces.
Double height volumes, operable upper openings, and carefully composed windows allow light, air, and landscape to move fluidly through the interiors, creating spaces that breathe naturally while maintaining intimacy and scale.
Materiality and craftsmanship play an equally important role in shaping the home’s identity. Exposed brick, Kota stone, wood columns, Mangalore patterned tiles, granite flooring, and handcrafted surfaces create spaces that feel tactile, layered, and deeply inhabited. Inspired by vernacular references from North Malabar and coastal Karnataka, colonnaded walkways, crafted wood joinery, operable clerestories, and integrated lighting were developed through close collaboration with local craftsmen. More than a visual composition, Between Gardens is ultimately about belonging. Landscape and architecture merge seamlessly through tropical planting, shaded pathways, water bodies, and layered gardens that soften the surrounding urban density. Neither entirely traditional nor overtly modern, the house exists in a quieter middle ground shaped by memory, climate, craft, and everyday life; a home where architecture becomes inseparable from the lives lived within it.
DE EARTH
AP Arcade,1752 A1/29, Palazhi Road, Nellikode P.O,
Pottammal, Kozhikode, Kerala, 673016
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