Residence · Chennai · 2023

A shrine, and the house around it

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

The whole of this house exists as drawings. Only one part of it exists as a photograph of something finished, and it is the smallest thing in the set — a shrine, built into an arch, which started as a sheet of plywood cut to shape.

A 3D view of a children's bedroom — twin beds against a wall of marble-inlay panels, a long bench under each, and a fan under a curved cove ceiling.

Type: Residence
Where: Chennai
Year: 2023
Services: Space planning

The brief

A house in Chennai, drawn room by room between December 2022 and May 2023: a living room, a family room, three bedrooms, a foyer, a home theatre and the mandir. Sapna designed it at B&A Design Studio, from the first 3D views through to the carpentry, ceiling and tiling sheets the site worked from.

What we did

One shape holds the house together. An arch appears in the mandir, in the canopy over the four-poster bed, in the painted panels behind the family room's sofa and in the radial inlay set into the foyer floor — the same curve at four sizes, in four materials. Everything around it is deliberately quiet: pale stone, fluted plaster, cove light behind every ceiling drop, so that in any given room the arch is the only thing asking to be looked at.

The mandir itself was drawn three times over — an elevation, a ceiling detail and a tiling setout — before anything was cut.

The result

This is a design set and a building site, not a portfolio of finished rooms, and the pictures below are arranged to say so. The renders are renders. The photographs are of a false ceiling going in, panelling being fitted, a plaster rosette being formed and a door being finished.

The exception is the mandir: plywood arch, and then the same arch painted, lit and standing on stone. It is the one place in this project where a drawing can be set beside the thing it turned into.

The mandir, before and after

The mandir

The same arch finished — hand-painted foliage over the whole surface, a green panel behind, cove light around the inner edge, on a stone platform. — Finished

The one part of this house anybody photographed twice. Everything else here is either a drawing or a building site.

The bedrooms

The children's room from the opposite corner — the twin beds, the inlay panels and a run of pendant lights. — The same room, from the door

The end of the children's room — a long table with two chairs, a curved daybed, sheer curtains the full height of the wall. — And its far end

A 3D view of the master bedroom — an arched marble headboard panel with a tree drawn across it, in a gold frame, under a curved cove ceiling. — The master bedroom

The other end of the master bedroom — a lit dressing mirror and console set into a wall of fine diamond-patterned glazing. — Its dressing wall

A four-poster bed with a slim black arched canopy frame, between two curtained windows, with a wardrobe run behind it. — The second bedroom

The same bedroom from the other side — a low panelled wall carrying a television, the arched canopy bed to the right. — And its television wall

The living and family rooms

These six are the smallest files in the whole archive — 550 to 860 pixels across. They are shown at the size they can actually hold rather than enlarged to match everything else on the page.

A lit display and shelving unit in pale stone and brass, either side of a green marble panel, with a desk in front of it. — The study wall

Two facing sofas on a round rug, a round wall disc between the windows, a track light overhead. — The living room

A curved seating group under a tall oval mirror set into a stone wall. — The lounge

A television set into a panelled wall beside a pair of tall sliding screens, with a low sofa and round tables. — The family room

A long sectional sofa against a wall of arched painted panels showing a landscape. — Its long wall

A sculptural console under an arched mirror, on a marble floor, with a bench to one side. — The console wall

On site

There is no finished photography of this house. What there is instead is the middle of the job — which is the part nobody photographs, and the part a drawing set is actually for.