House by the Pond, located in Amreli, Gujarat, is conceived as a profound dialogue between memory and presence, past and future. Built for the client’s parents, its very essence lies in the emotional attachment to the land where the old house once stood. The new dwelling, spread across five unified plots, respects the spirit of the past by sitting in the south-west precinct, where memories are rooted. A pond to the east becomes the reflecting pool of time, mirroring the lives lived and those to come.
The architecture unfurls like a sequence of spaces, each defined by the interaction of light and shadow, material and void. The house is approached from a 10-meter-wide road on the north, with a private entry from south off the internal road, is reserved for the client, marking a passage from public to personal.
The spatial choreography begins with a 10-meter passage – a threshold. It disconnects the double-height living room from the rest of the mass, a moment of suspension before the architecture opens up to the courtyard. Three circular skylights puncture this corridor, anchoring your gaze upwards to the light, the eternal. The living room itself expands onto two decks: one embraces the intimacy of a private garden, the other, the calm of the pond. The southern façade, sculpted around a secondary courtyard, reveals protruding masses, one adorned with exposed brick, celebrating texture and light and the other adorned with wooden fins, creating covered balcony. This play of materials invites a dance of shadow and illumination, enriching the sensory experience of the home.
Materiality here is a narrative. Exposed brick speaks of permanence, while brick jali screens cast shifting patterns of light and shadow across the courtyard, an ever-changing play creating a perforated screen. The cantilevered mass over the pond – a gesture of weightless balance – becomes a moment of suspension. The architecture engages with the elements, allowing the house to breathe, to adapt, and ultimately, to tell its own story through time.