Projects

House in Auroville

While practicing in Auroville, Ar. Ashumi (founder of Design Undo) got an opportunity to collaborate with Vastukham Architects and take a role of project Architect for this residence around Auroville. The house is situated in a gated community. Our role was to execute the complete project and supervise from the foundation until the finishing stage. To get a complete hands-on experience and for quality control, most of our time was spent on the site learning from the artisans who had come from Kerala.

The house belongs to a young couple who is inclined to adapt a sustainable lifestyle. We tried to make a home which had features from the traditional South Indian culture and traditions yet having modern amenities.

House in Kodaikanal

The house is nestled in the hills of Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, built for a family of 4. The client gave us a brief of making a sustainable home for his family using the local resources. In such conditions, the conventional way of making a house is to buy resources from far-off cities so it was a good challenge to work upon.
The site being on hilly terrain, there was an abundance of stones procured from existing rocks. All of that was used for foundation and stone masonry walls. The load-bearing structure was made of rammed earth walls using yellow soil from the site.

Rest- Studio House in Auroville

We call this a house of experimentation for many reasons. The client gave us a lot of freedom while designing and executing his first house. It was our first time executing a rat-trap bond in lime mortar in a load-bearing structure. This house breaks free from a conventional BHK category, as we envisioned a space that was multi-functional in nature and serves the specific requirement of the client than just the conventional and aesthetics. This homestead on half-acre land will be surrounded by a kitchen garden and a food forest. From the east entry of the house, you enter the kitchen and then a double-height studio space for our designer client that has a staircase leading to the bedroom and a balcony.

The client is a designer himself, and a lot of elements came to life from the pages of his sketchbook. Like the in-built work desk with interesting storage spaces, the pond, and the entire waste treatment area is the brainchild of our super-talented client.
There is another independent structure that serves as a guest room now with an outdoor toilet.

Rammed Earth at Farm Aananda, Chandigarh

Farm Ananda is a well known permaculture farm around Chandigarh. This project is very close to our hearts for many reasons. We feel very grateful to work with like minded individuals and collaborate on vision oriented projects that pretty much aligns with our philosophy as a practice.
Our friend and Principal Architect at Studio Aureole, Ar. Jitesh Mallik gave us this wonderful opportunity to work on this project as a Rammed Earth consultant and execute rammed earth walls for Phase-1 of construction. Along with our expert artisans we trained the local team in Chandigarh for 3 weeks who were very new to building with mud. We saw their confidence building with each wall they executed.
The soil was procured from the site and we stabilized the mix with locally sourced lime.

House in Alwar, Rajasthan

The house is situated in the outskirts of Alwar, Rajasthan. We were the rammed Earth consultants for this project. With the availability of lime in the region, we executed rammed earth walls stabilised with lime.