A home of courtyards in Andhra Pradesh

A childhood reprised

The curious thing about childhood homes is that they rarely remain confined to the past, shaping every future space one inhabits. The studio seemed to have caught onto this nuance: “The homeowner grew up near the Chettinad region and had this specific feeling she wanted back. Not a certain look, but a feeling,” recall Anupama and Gautham. “The weight of old columns, the way coloured glass scatters light or how cool breeze moves through the verandahs in the afternoon. She didn’t desire a replica — she wanted to live inside a memory.” 

Chettinad influences served as tenets that guided how the home took shape on the land. “From our first visit, we knew the courtyard had to come first. Not as an amenity, but as the organising principle of the entire house,” Anupama states. This is where the design conversation took a sensorial turn: not in superfluous details, but in how air would move, where shade would appear and how sunlight would animate spaces.

The courtyards we inhibit

“The 16-foot square courtyard works because it serves as a thermal chimney, allowing hot air to rise and escape, while drawing in cooler air. The deep verandah creates a shaded buffer between the harsh outdoors and the interior. Once we understood the logic, we could work with them without imitating forms,” Gautham says. Finished in tandur stone, the courtyard’s edges are stippled with reclaimed columns salvaged from Chettinad mansions, as though the home’s future were carried on by old bearers.

Colours of Chettinad architecture

Manai’s tale is written as much by its craftsmen as by the hands at Studio Meld. Its rooms and transitional zones carry an imprint all their own, tinged in hues of Athangudi tiles, handcrafted in the historic hamlet that lends them their name — red in the corridor, green and blue in the bedrooms and yellow in the communal spaces. “The slight variations in colour and the handmade quality of each pattern, those aren’t imperfections. They’re the point. The arrival of the craftsmen brought something of Chettinad’s original spirit to the home,” Anupama and Gautham observe. 

The most enduring presence within the walls is the family’s legacy, embodied in the heirloom furniture created by the grandfather of the homeowner’s husband. With a foundation shaped at Shantiniketan, he was a renowned artist and product designer who represented India at the United Nations in Japan, where he also gained a mastery of ceramic pottery — and whose ideas found lasting expression in a book he authored in 1947. 

“The rooms were sized and arranged so his pieces could breathe and be savoured. A house with this kind of inheritance needs to step back and let its objects speak,” the duo muses. We often imagine nostalgia as an amorphous feeling we carry within us. But memory quietly waits within architecture itself, resurfacing through spaces that were conceived with care — and Manai is proof.

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