It’s a home by a river; a farmhouse that is as much a haven for humans as it is for animals. It stands tall in a quiet, secluded neighbourhood in the outbacks of Kerala’s Kozhikode (formerly Calicut), an ancient port city on the lush Malabar Coast.
Architect Rohit Palakkal of Kozhikode-based firm Nestcraft Architecture monikered it “100,” a simple testament to its well-rounded nature of bringing together the environs and the concrete in a way that feels seamless, almost like the free-flowing river, where the owners go fishing.
“It’s a family of four, and they lived in a very tiny space right behind where this home is, before they moved in here,” says Palakkal. “I did not want them to move out of the neighbourhood with their animals, so I decided to make a space that would feel like home to all of them—their cats, dogs and cattle too.”
It’s as much a home of functionality as it is of honouring the natural landscape it is built on, with fenestrations that flood the home with light and breeze.
The inhabitants of the house belong to three generations, and pursue professions of science, law, and teaching. When they come home to their farmhouse, expectedly, they wish to put their feet up and let their hair down, and Palakkal’s design allows them to do just that. “The architecture is fairly simple,” he says. “It’s a west-facing home, so it gets optimum sunlight that is facilitated through the skylight and double heighted ceiling of 6.3 metres,” he says, pointing to the ample breathing space the home receives to watch the sun travel across the sky every day.
Some walls are left bare as a nod to the rustic charm of the way of living that the home embraces; all of them are made of locally sourced materials such as laterite bricks. A lot of wooden surfaces in warmer shades of brown offset the brilliant yellow on the wall. Intermittently, the surfaces are interjected with hints of white and silver metal along with glass that blurs the boundaries between the indoors and the outdoors.
The shared spaces are spread across the ground floor, while the bedrooms are on the first floor. The puja room lies adjacent to the terrace that overlooks a swathe of green.
Palakkal’s clients are fairly simple people. “They always lived very simply, and only had one ask when they approached me to come on board—four bedrooms, with four attached bathrooms, that’s it. The rest would be my intervention,” he says. The architect was mindful of their uncomplicated way of living, so in order to honour it, he decided to “elevate” their lifestyle, instead of uprooting and planting them in a “posh” neighbourhood.
The double-height ceiling was in keeping with the unobstructed flow of the house, where no ceiling covers the dining and living areas on the ground floor, allowing it to directly reach for the skies that host the bedrooms. There’s also an external courtyard, skirting the river in their backyard, which can be viewed from the bridge connecting the bedrooms on the first floor.
The plinth area is 2,100 square feet, with louvered windows that are distinctly slatted, helping to control the heat in a high humid-tropical zone.
The home did not have to be perfect—it just had to feel like a home built with human hands and intent. Palakkal, whose practice heavily involves working with indigenous materials and artisans, employed the same philosophy for this house as well. “Barring the sanitary fittings, tiles and maybe the wiring, everything is made in-house,” he says.
Palakkal’s appreciation for the touch of human hands is evident from the way he has crafted the home into a cohesive whole, with earthy accents dotting every surface. There’s a bookshelf under the staircase, there are stretches of blank that don’t need plugging, there are potted plants in corners, and circular skylights that act like natural spotlights.
The land that the home stands on isn’t flawless, as the architect explains; it’s marked with imperfections that the structure embraces and makes its own, by weaving them into its blueprint.
Palakkal’s speciality lies in underlining this very beauty in the spareness of forms with clean lines and primary colours. For his own home-cum-studio, he engaged the contentious brutalist style of architecture and married it to the local vernacular style, creating a space that is unique, yet rooted in its origins. With “100,” the architect pays an ode to the idyllic way of life, but without compromising on modern-day comforts. The home is testament to the fact that less, more often than not, is truly more.