House of Three Walls

A family of five asked for a house on a plot they had held for eleven years, with two requirements that turned out to govern everything. The ground floor had to remain fully usable by a grandparent who does not manage stairs, and the house had to be buildable in two phases, because the second phase depended on a sale that had not yet happened.

The plot is 14 by 21 metres and bounded on three sides by existing party walls — north, east and south. It is open only to the west, which in Pune is the hardest orientation to be open to: the late sun in April and May is brutal on a west face. It falls 900mm from front to back. Setbacks left a buildable footprint of 246 m². With only one open edge, no room could be lit from the perimeter alone, and that single fact determined the plan before we drew anything.

The plan is organised around a courtyard because it had to be. With three party walls, a perimeter-lit plan produces a deep, dark middle; cutting an 18 m² void through the centre gives every principal room a second orientation, lets the stair work in daylight, and allows warm air to stack out at the top rather than pooling under the roof.

The courtyard costs floor area — 18 m² of a 246 m² footprint, about seven per cent — and that loss is the project's central trade. It buys cross-ventilation in every room on both floors, a ground floor that reads as one continuous space while remaining four separable rooms, and a west facade we could afford to keep almost closed, because the light no longer has to come from that side. Section AA, sheet A-301 below, shows this more clearly than any photograph: the void, the stair set against it, and the way the roof steps back on both sides so the courtyard does not become a light well.

It is built in load-bearing brick, 230mm, with a reinforced concrete floor and roof — a system every mason in the neighbourhood already knows, which was the point when the work had to pause for fourteen months between phases and restart with a different crew. The courtyard is paved in the same kota stone as the interior floors, laid to fall to a single gully. If we detailed it again we would deepen the first-floor gallery by 300mm: at its current 1.2 metres it works as circulation and just fails as somewhere to sit, which is the compromise we are least happy with.