A Home for All Seasons

Set high on a bluff with dizzying valley views, this family home in Aamby Valley by KdnD Studio is a thoughtful response to the weather dictates of tropical living

The hoary real estate chestnut about ‘location, location, location’ might well have been invented for The Shift House. Commanding a high perch over Lonavala in Maharashtra’s Aamby Valley, about 120 kilometres south-east of Mumbai, this weekend retreat fsor a businessman and his family of children and grandchildren offers a million-dollar view of the Western Ghats that quietly dovetails with a design that’s incredibly sympathetic to the natural environment.

The work of Mumbai-based KdnD Studio, the 650-square-metre home sits on a sprawling 2,200-square-metre site, which came with its own challenges. For starters, its uneven contours and sheer steep slope rendered more than half of it unusable. The solution, says project lead and studio partner Shobhan Kothari, was to drop the two-storey building’s elevation by a level. Not only did this sleight of hand reduce the contour, it also allowed a more intimate, scaled entrance that allows the house to read visually as a single storey.

The region’s tropical climate and year-round rain informed the building’s silhouette, with Kothari and his team orienting the upper (entrance-level) volume towards the south and east to provide cover from rain and sun, alongside a brise-soleil which frames an elegant loggia and timber screens for the four bedrooms laid out along the spine of the building.

KdnD’s design philosophy is based on simplicity, but as Kothari notes, this involves unravelling the complexities of a project to provide a simplified interpretation that makes the design look effortless yet effective. ‘We’re cognisant of the environment we build in, and the architecture and interiors need to respond,’ he says.

In the context of The Shift House, this approach meant driving the mass of its concrete lower level into the earth so that it feels viscerally organic, the muted colour palette softly complemented by Nepali green stone. The result is that the building, which Kothari describes as a play of Jenga blocks, dissolves into the background allowing the lower level — which holds the dining and living rooms, the main bedroom and staff quarters — to open out to the nine-metre swimming pool and beyond that, the jaw-dropping vista of mountains and lake in the valley below.

‘We are always conscious of the need to provide solutions for tropical living,’ says Kothari of the work of KdnD Studio, which he founded with partners Kiran Kapadia and Anand Menon in 2010.

‘For us, designing is about creating intangible experiences that are impressed in memory,’ the architect says. If the transparency and delicate presence of The Shift House — so sympathetic to its setting — are anything to go by, it’s clear that KdnD has, in an unusually unforgettable way, hit all its marks.

Text / Daven Wu
Images / Photographix | Sebastian Zachariah