Residential House Samudra by Urban Workshop in Chennai, India

Project: Samudra Residence Architects: Urban Workshop Location: Chennai, India Year: 2021 Photography: Niveditaa Gupta

Residential House Samudra by Urban Workshop in Chennai, India

Samudra is a coastal house in Akkarai, Chennai, designed with an informal and intimate atmosphere. The house includes closely located rooms, minimizing the use of corridors and large glass doors that create a connection between the house and garden. The single-pitched roof and bricks evoke associations with a home from our memory, creating a feeling of warmth and harmony with wooden finishes.

The dining room presents a deeply recessed space creating contrast, while bedrooms have softer plaster walls for a feeling of lightness. Corrosion-resistant steel, stone and concrete complement the character of bricks and gain beauty with age. The house is located in a growing and green area with the best quality of life, inviting people to live outdoors.

Samudra is located in Akkarai — a coastal suburb of Chennai on the Eastern Highway. The city is developing southward with housing often used as a secondary home. Some city dwellers have moved to the coast for better quality of life. The pandemic led to an even greater number of people moving to these areas. The atmosphere is calm, open and green — inviting a more active lifestyle outdoors.

The architecture of the house was formed by closely positioned rooms where one room leads to another. The goal was to minimize the use of corridors originally intended for separating serviced and service spaces, in favor of a more informal and intimate environment. The house is positioned in the middle of the plot with garden on both sides. The edges are open and permeable, large glass doors create many relationships between the house and garden.

A part of the task was to build a house with a single-pitched roof. The single-pitched roof and bricks evoke associations with a home from our memory. The roof extends to the veranda at the entrance where we placed swings. Bricks were combined with a framed structure to ensure large openings in all rooms. We explored materials in various forms throughout the house. The staff block has a load-bearing brick wall, broken bricks were transformed into clay plaster used in other buildings.

The living room and study have high ceilings, brick walls and large glass doors through which you can look at the garden. The dining room is a deeply recessed space, contrasting with other parts of the house, and we used wooden cladding to create a feeling of warmth. The dark corridor connects two spaces where silence prevails. Silence is needed to appreciate the notes. We treated bedrooms with softer plaster walls to create a feeling of lightness.

Wooden finishes harmonize with the linear character of bricks. The main doors are made from strips of wood joined together. On the other hand, the scale of the bronze railing is enlarged to compensate for the small scale of bricks. We introduced materials such as corrosion-resistant steel for fencing and stone walls and floors to complement the character of bricks and concrete, which gain beauty with age.

–Urban Workshop