The House of Memories is born from the desire to move ahead with the times and meet changing requirements. It also preserves familial memories and celebrates its roots. The home is located on a 165′ x 55′ plot in Valsad. The city is known for its beautiful farmland and lotus ponds. These natural elements also become part of the narrative, celebrating the context.
The home occupies the site of the family’s earlier abode, a sprawling 22-room structure that also functioned as their office. The old house stood next to a small well. The client had purchased it from a Parsi gentleman, along with its beautiful wooden furniture.
While the house had numerous rooms, they were small and lacked user-friendly spatial planning. With ageing family members, including one who is physically challenged, the need for a modern and inclusive home became crucial. A barrier-free design became an essential part of the new home.
House Of Memories Reinterprets Family Heritage Through An Inclusive Modern Home | Studio Lagom
Studio Lagom was presented with this assignment when the plinth for a frame structure had already been constructed. The architects envisioned this home very differently. The well-travelled clients preferred an exposed brick edifice, so the architects opted for a load-bearing structure. They crafted a narrative that revolved around the well, celebrating it as a positive element. As earlier, the building would include a residential section and an adjacent workspace.
The architectural presence of the structure is emphatic, yet rooted in the context. The workspace block engages more actively with the streetscape. It remains partially hidden behind a main gate inspired by the shutters of a tambour desk. The main elevation features a concrete-bordered box with teak slats. Strategic green plantations soften its lines and edges as they cascade from the top and spill through the wooden strips.
The office entrance is discreet and sits within a narrower block next to the larger one. Adjacent to it, the residential section has a recessed entrance within a hollow concrete box. A large, carved dela door marks the entrance.
Step past its artisanal beauty and follow a path lined with greenery and a few Burmese pots from the clients’ collection. The path leads to the house proper, with its programme arranged in a C-shape. Rooms open into and border a verdant courtyard with a lotus pond and the well to one side.
The ground floor accommodates a living room, a temple set within a water court, the dining area, kitchen, and two bedrooms. The upper level houses two expansive primary bedrooms, the master bedroom and the son’s room, along with a family room and a guest room. The two levels connect through a staircase that unfolds without any vertical connections.
The design emphasises an inside-outside feel through large and small louver-shuttered windows, small punctures, and skylights. These elements create an immersive environment that benefits from sunlight and greenery. Every room opens into the outdoors, either through a garden or a lush terrace. Some spaces also connect to slivers of plantations, highlighting the biophilic approach to space planning.
The master bedroom opens onto a private terrace. It caters to the occupant’s fondness for entertaining and the culinary arts.
Similarly, the study in the son’s room overlooks the mature, rounded canopy of a frangipani near the well and the rest of the courtyard. In the private spaces for the senior citizens, the client’s parents and uncle, bamboo growing on site frames the backdrop to their living quarters.
Smaller, thoughtful gestures also support this strategy. A floor-level, L-shaped, glass-inset slit in the living room maintains the line of sight when seated. It allows the eye to travel towards the lily pond beyond.
The design creates a sense of being outdoors through enclosed areas, al fresco spaces, semi-open areas, and open pockets. This gives users the freedom to experience their home at their own pace and in their own way. The dining area clearly reflects this approach. It sits between a skylit landscaped court on one side and the lily pond and central courtyard on the other.
A series of louvered, sliding-folding windows separates the enclosed and al fresco spaces. Users can adjust these windows to control the connection between the two spaces at varying intensities.
Materiality is honest, weaving the intrinsic integrity of elements into a powerful, nuanced narrative. The client-mandated scheme of exposed brick, Kota, and wood was augmented with concrete (in plain and terrazzo avatars) to add a contemporariness to the narrative. The wooden elements used in this project are either salvaged from the earlier house—as shutters, cabinets and timber—or procured as reclaimed wood from elsewhere. Overall, the house demonstrates a delicate balance of creativity and functionality when it comes to weaving objects from the old house into this one.
Most walk-in wardrobes, for instance, feature door shutters from the old home, installed in a rhythmic fashion and completed by adding wooden expanses as and where needed. Similarly, the present staircase uses wooden treads of the old one, embedded in larger concrete blocks for added width, and cabinet doors and carcasses have been transformed into standalone storage units, now poised on brass legs. A prudent approach can be seen in the way leftover material has been used to line terraces.
The reuse and recycling of old elements and the unplastered brick walls also align with the clients’ and architects’ strive towards creating a sustainable home. The use of solar energy and the harvesting of rainwater are other endeavours that come under this ambit.
The inclusion of objects from the clients’ old home and blending them with a curated collection of purchased pieces make each space unique and high on storytelling. An old four-poster bed, a wooden wardrobe gifted at the wedding of the senior couple, old timepieces, antique objects, vintage seating and an old charpoy, among many others, are teamed with South Indian pillars with decorative capitals, ornate boat ends and objets d’art roughly hewn out of wood sourced from across India. This approach not only adds character to individual rooms but also contributes to the dynamism of the overall narrative. Various genres of original art—abstract, figurative, Indian folk, contemporary— painstakingly curated from across India adds its own charisma to the home.
A long brick wall deployed parallel to the public zone behind a linear watercourt segregates the workspace from the home. Christened the ‘dancing brick wall’ by the architects, this load-bearing element features bricks laid at varying angles and different degrees of protrusion from the base plane, creating a perforated textural expanse whose three-dimensional beauty is further amplified by the sunlight that flows in from the skylight above. This was a strategic move, designed to facilitate ventilation between the work and home blocks without sacrificing privacy for the home. On its other side lies a linear landscaped court brimming with greenery, another buffer zone to further separate the two areas.
In the workspace, a spiral staircase creates a striking statement near the entrance. It lies sandwiched between a glass partition that compartmentalises the home from the office and a lattice-like display screen that shields the work area from direct view. Seven windows, legacy of the old house again, seem to float in the transparent face of the latter, a move, again, to shield the home from the curious gaze of people visiting the office.
The office continues the spirit of the home by using the same materiality and vintage furniture—but the latter, in this case, is new pieces. Rather than just being a house, The House of Memories is a living, breathing entity, a system that is not only beautiful but also functional and resonant with the occupants’ lifestyle, past and present.
Fact File
Designed by: Studio Lagom
Project Type: Residential Architecture Design
Project Name: The House of Memories
Location: Valsad
Year: 2025
Project Size: 12000 Sq.ft
Design Team: Hardik Shah, Krishna Kapadia , Madhavi Gumasana, Sweta Gajiwala Doriwala
Photograph Courtesy: Ishita Sitwala
Structural Engineer / Civil Engineer: Rathi Consortium
Landscape Architect: Studio Roots, Hemali Landscape Studio
Contractor: Desai Construction
Plumbing: Burhanali Shaikh (Bhai Bhai Contractor)
Electrical: Nitin Patel
Carpenter: Vishwakarma Furniture
Flooring: Mortar Construction
Color/Painting: Bhupendra Thakur (Surat Painter)
Fabrication: Sai Shyam Engineering
Interior Decoration: Samir Wadekar
Source: ArchDaily
Firm’s Facbeook Link: Studio Lagom
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