Print Exclusive: Ode to the picturesque

Raised above the ground through cruciform columns, the 10,000 sq ft footprint is a photonegative of the machine-age pilotis; here, the ground plane is not vanquished to open space but made one with the landscape surrounding it. In this regard, the relationship between the indoor and the outdoor subverts the usual banality of home and garden or inside and outside. It indicates an affinity for a far more complex circulation. That of a picturesque circuit, an act of choreographing a sequence of visually composed scenes, much like moving through a series of paintings across time and space. In its restrained object story, the house is allowed room to grow with its residents. Rahul, who is the founder of his studio RMA Architects, has designed the architecture of the home. He explains the idea succinctly, “We see the house as an armature that supports life, and those experiences evolve with time,” says Rahul. Within this armature, the picturesque unfolds through moments of everyday inhabitation. In the living room, two sides open completely to the green vista outside. The two solid walls offer a visual frame to the trees in the garden, whose irregular branches create a complementary composition to Paramjit Singh’s paintings next to it. Mid-century modern furniture by masters like George Nakashima and Sergio Rodrigues punctuates the space alongside furniture designed by Rajiv himself.

Underfoot runs a pale green terrazzo connecting all the public spaces, mirroring the verdure outside. As we move to private spaces, the floor changes to wood. Rajiv, who leads his eponymous studio in Mumbai, designed the home’s interior world; he explains the choice of material, “In any other modern-day project, floors are factory-made, more often than not. Here, we went back to a craftsman in Chennai who’s been doing all the family’s homes for the last 75 years, laying solid wooden floors in the traditional way.” It is when the golden light subsumes the warmth of this material that it becomes evident the natural world runs parallel to the inner lives of the inhabitants. Between Japanese rice paper screens, wooden slats, punctured windows, a montage of scenery lures in an ineffable quality. Elliptical cut-outs animate the exteriors, bridging levels through shafts of light. This use of light and vista reaches a spiritual register in the meditation room where the concrete ceiling and wooden floors form a near-ascetic atmosphere. When one sits in the centre of this space, on the quilted low cushion over a flatweave dhurrie in the early hours of the morning, they are greeted by the dappled crepuscular sun filtering through the foliage on their left and right. “It is a real communion with nature,” says Rajiv.

This communion transcends into unbridled awe, aided by a dissolution of opacity in the Forest Room. Located above the ground plane, in this aerie there is no semblance of walls, just an endless field of vision. To create this ethereal effect, Rahul mentions how the public spaces were placed on the ground ensuring privacy on the upper level. What transpired was “a pavilion-like structure and transparent spaces that were simple in disposition.” He explains how the natural world ushered this decision, “The existing trees on the site form a wonderful canopy, so the house was about framing them. This allowed for the simplest expression architecturally, as the views were all to the outside and as transparent as possible.”

In repudiation of barriers, the space offers a way of looking that subsumes the inhabitants in the verdure. Sometimes, appreciation of the picturesque may not lie in making the infinite tangible, but in ceding to its vast expanse. Between the pavilion and the ground plane, the landscape flows into the form. Where there are instances of framed engagement, there are also moments of complete surrender; the house reflects a desire for a life both sheltered and continuous with the landscape. A simple impulse carried across geography and generations, like an anthropological heirloom — the duality of situating a distinct self within nature’s infinity while simultaneously becoming one with its luminosity.

Read more: An architectural anomaly rises where Aamir and Hameeda Sharma make the outdoors a permanent trait of the indoors