Project: Shadow House
Architects: Samira Rathod Design Associates
Location: Mumbai, India
Area: 5,000 sq ft
Photographs by: Edmund Sumner
The Shadow House is a luxury modern home designed by Mumbai-based architecture studio Samira Rathod Design Associates. This 5,000 square foot home is located in the coastal town of Alibaug, just south of Mumbai, the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra.
One of the most prominent features about this home is its weathered steel roof that slopes over a graveled courtyard. The courtyard around which the entire home wraps around is partially covered by the Corten steel roof.
Even though the home is designed as modern as it can be, its layout references the traditional courtyard homes that can be seen in the southern parts of India.
Set on the foothills of Maharashtra in Alibaug, far away from the busy city life of Mumbai. The plot was a dry barren piece of parched earth. When I first saw it, there were two lonely trees; a view of the hills in the distance and dry fields all the way to the sky, all around.
In that scorching heat, there was only one desire – to be lulled back into that familiar dark, cold, calmness.
The courtyard house of southern India does this well, with its overarching low slung roofs and a central courtyard around which the rooms surround.
The idea of the house began here.
This house is carefully sited between the two trees, grazing its walls into its crown; its three bedrooms, and living spaces surround an half bounded courtyard with a sliver that opens into a small plunge pool; indigo blue water, that spouts out gushing waters. Its sounds making for cooling delight.
The courtyard is marked with a the babul tree for shade, which as it would grow would engulf its entire space and suffuse the house with its blazing fragrance and a confetti of tiny white flowers every morning.
Architecturally the courtyard doesn’t open to spaces, but instead, to a broad corridor that works like a woody bridge holding a study, under a sweeping corten steel roof and ties all the upper rooms into a single floor.
–Samira Rathod Design Associates
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