The Wabi-Sabi House

The Wabi-Sabi House

Completed - December 2023
Location - Elathur, Calicut
Video - Abhimanyu KV

Designing for one of your closest friends is always the hardest and the easiest things to do ; it is basically like designing for yourself and that by default means there are a zillion things and ideas that you want to put into this one design. So, when Vysakh came to us with his wishes and aspirations for his dream home, a lot which we had already heard from him over the years over a lot of casual conversations, we knew it was not going to be just his dream home it was going to be ours too.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese concept that involves recognizing the beauty in transience and imperfection and that is a lot of what this house tries to do. Rooted in ecleticism , the house tries to recapture the nostalgia of the anglo-indian architecture (something the client loves) but at the same time tones it down in to a contemporary palette. Be it the bold use of colours or the repurposed-oldschool-shopfront-wooden planks, this house does not want to fit in but at the same time, with its humble and simplistic form , it stays connected to the context as well.