Residence · 2023

A staircase with a house around it

Sapna led this project at B&A Design Studio, Pune, before founding Katha.

A house on two floors, planned around a single flight of stairs — and drawn to the point where the floor plans stopped being working documents and became something you would frame.

A 3D view of a double-height living room — a pale sofa and a rust armchair on a marble floor with a black key-pattern border, full-height curtains, a tree in the corner and planting hung from the ceiling.
Type
Residence
Year
2023
Services
Space planning

The brief

A family house, designed at B&A Design Studio and issued as a full design set in May 2023: layouts for both floors, and 3D views of the living room, the dining room and three bedrooms. Katha has no photographs of it. What follows is the set as it was drawn.

What we did

Everything in the house points at the stair. It climbs the double-height volume in one flight against a wall of fluted timber, with the living room laid out underneath it and a run of planting hung from the ceiling above — so the tallest space in the house is also the one you cross most often.

The floor below it is marble with a black key-pattern border, and from there the palette turns warm and dark: rust leather, olive green, a burnt-gold ceiling over the dining room. Each bedroom takes one of those colours and calms it down — olive and brass in the parents' room, blush and blossom in the children's, and a sculpted plaster wall behind the master bed.

The result

The two floor layouts are at the bottom of this page, as they were drawn: cream, with the furniture rendered in plan and a fine wave texture behind it. They are presentation drawings, and they are the reason this project is on the site at all — a plan that a client can read without being taught how is worth as much to a project as any 3D view of it.

The rooms

The same living room from the other side, with a white stair climbing a wall of fluted timber in one flight.
The stair
The double-height living room seen along its length — a television on a stone panel, the upper floor open above, planting hung across the ceiling.
Looking back at the volume
Round marble tables and curved chairs under a textured gold ceiling, with a gold disc artwork on a fluted wall and an olive-green shelving run to one side.
The dining room
A bed with a rust leather headboard against a sculpted plaster wall hung with brass spheres, under a glass chandelier.
The master bedroom
Two scalloped blush beds against a floral wallpaper, under a chandelier of glass blossoms.
The children's room
A low bed against a deep olive-green upholstered wall, between two brass wall lights, with two framed abstracts above.
The parents' room

The two floor layouts

Drawn to be read by someone who does not read plans — which is most of the people a plan is drawn for.

A styled floor plan of the lower floor, furniture drawn in plan on a cream ground with a fine wave line texture.
Lower floor
A styled floor plan of the upper floor in the same treatment, with the stair and the void over the living room.
Upper floor

The other projects

Residence · Kolhapur · 2026A house that opens upward Residence · Chennai · 2023A shrine, and the house around it

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