This Bengaluru Home Overlooks a Secret Garden on Every Floor! (House Tour)

When we build in an urban scenario of quite dense buildings around, there is a lot of change that happens very frequently. The house is a good example of creating interest within your site and the house overlooking into that garden, which would be almost like a template for an urban scenario. We have tried to respond to the context, quite dense buildings around. We also have a garden, which in the foreseeable future should still have an identity of its own. Hi, I'm Appachoo. Hi, I'm Vijay. We run an architecture practice in Bangalore. We are called Studio 4A. Join us for an exclusive home tour of the house with the secret garden in JP Nagar, Bangalore. To watch premium videos and access PDF ebooks with house plans, log on to buildify.com. The link is in the description below. We thought of calling this house a house with a secret garden because the site had a very strong context of having a very large garden at the right side, which is the east. So our obvious reaction was to open up more towards the back. So we have a 45 by 60 site. There is a road towards the west. Right from the entry, we have kept in mind that the structure should age gracefully. We have treated the car parking area with a Sadarali granite in a riverbed finish. And we have the main entrance lobby and access in the front here. All our main habitable spaces have been placed around this garden, which is in the southeast, such that it gets a lot of light and ventilation through the day. So we have a bedroom and the main living dining area, which all open up to the landscape. This is the core of the house. This is the garden as well as the courtyard of the house, where the house breathes. We thought that we could capture the existing garden and sort of continue it into the southeast corner of the house. And at every floor, the house overlooks into the courtyard of the house. We have the staircase from the ground floor, comes up to the first floor. And we have the main entry to the first floor residence. So as you enter the house, you are greeted by this little console and a screen behind it. This space is designed to feel like a pavilion in the garden. We have a deck on the east side, which has a little bit of a green patch and the larger garden below. We wanted to do a cement oxide finish in the roof of the living room that breaks from the, you know, the starkness of the paint. And I think it complements and brings the room together very well. The powder room is tucked under the stairs and the kitchen also comes again towards the north. The puja opens up to the dining and we have a small guest bedroom on this level. Once we come up from the internal staircase to the second floor, we open up into a family room and a small study in the corner of the family room. There is the master bedroom, in spite of being located in the southwest, gets a nice early morning sun from the east. The other bedroom, which is the daughter's bedroom, also opens up both towards the garden as well as towards the east. The family room, however, has a nice sit-out which opens up towards the west and we have also added a lot of landscape and screens to protect it from the harsh setting sun. On the third floor, which is mainly the entertainment space, we have a nice bar and lounge, a small powder room and a large sit-out space towards the south. This connects all the way directly from the ground floor through an elevator. We've also consciously pushed the sit-out a little to the back so that it overlooks the sit-out on the first floor as well as the garden below. So it gives you that expanse of space as we move up. The sit-out has been detailed with a screen so that you get a lot of privacy towards the south and the west where we have neighboring buildings. In the bar, we've used a polished quota and for the outdoor area, we've used a leather finish of the same stone. For the final floor, we've also done something called an under-deck insulation. So that cuts down a major amount of the heat that comes from the roof slab. So by placing the services towards the northwest, you're also insulating the house from the harsh summer sun. The client was very clear about their brief in terms of the requirements. They were also relatively clear about the aesthetic preferences that they have. However, they also did understand the role of an architect and what we had to bring to the table, which is stuff like having a nice brightly lit house, having good ventilation, and overall the interpretation of their aesthetic requirement was left to us. I think that always leads to a successful project where the client trusts the architect.