Besant Nagar House

House as a Ritual - An anti-interior project.

In this Besant Nagar House, everyday life unfolds as a ritual, shaped by a deliberate sequence of spaces, the presence and absence of light and material textures that keep us connected to nature.

Set on a small plot within a dense, contiguous street, the design had to contend with several challenges: compact room sizes, the need for light and ventilation in every space and a demand for privacy from the street. A mango tree and the open space around it, located on the northeast corner, became the anchor for the project. Every day, the social spaces of a house were organised around this, and the private rooms faced the street.

The “inward balcony” emerged as both invention and necessity: an edge that borrows the life of the street but filters it, drawing in light and air while holding privacy intact. It is neither purely inside nor entirely out, a liminal place where the house negotiates with its context.

This anti-interior project resists the idea of sealed, self-contained rooms being furnished as a commodity. Instead, it uses materials, textures, and the choreography of light to define its spaces — blurring the boundary between inside and outside, and turning the house into a lived ritual.