Villa Karun

The plot sits on a laterite shelf thirty metres above the Arabian Sea, facing west. The client, a shipping executive who had spent twenty years looking at water from bridge decks, wanted a home that felt equally rooted. Previous architects had proposed maximising the view through full-height glazing on every facade. We disagreed. A house made of glass on a west-facing coastal site is a greenhouse by three in the afternoon. The brief required starting over.

We designed from the inside out and from the climate inward. Walls are 450mm thick, double the structural minimum, providing thermal mass that absorbs the afternoon heat and releases it slowly through the night. Deep overhangs of 1.8 metres shade every opening. Primary rooms are ventilated by cross-flow apertures aligned to the prevailing southwesterly. There is no mechanical air-conditioning in the living or sleeping zones. The material palette was drawn entirely from the site: laterite stone quarried 12 kilometres away, Mangalore clay tile on the roof, and Athangudi tile flooring whose cool surface temperature we measured and specified to within two degrees. The seaward facade is not a wall of glass but a sequence of framed apertures, each one composing a specific portion of the view as you move through the house.

The house maintains an interior temperature of 26 to 28 degrees through the Konkan summer without mechanical cooling. It has been published in Architectural Digest India, Wallpaper, and the Japan-based journal CASA Brutus. The owner has received three acquisition offers for the property since completion. He has declined all of them.