Jaali Residence

Our clients had grown up in this house and did not want to replace it with a four-floor rental building like their neighbours had. The structure was sound; the plan was not. We stripped the house to its frame, removed two internal walls to make one long living space, and added a new first-floor room for their daughter.

The street face was the real problem. South-west sun and a busy road meant the front rooms were always either hot or shut. The answer is a double skin: the old wall, now mostly glass, and a new screen of perforated mild steel one metre in front of it. The jaali cuts direct sun by about two thirds, lets the breeze through, and at night turns the house into a lantern.

Everything removed was reused somewhere. Old Mangalore tiles became the garden path, teak window frames became the dining table, and the original cement tiles were lifted, cleaned and re-laid in the verandah. The house kept its address, its trees and its memory, and gained another fifty years.